White House artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto czar David Sacks claimed Thursday that the federal government’s lack of a “long-term strategy” on cryptocurrency has negatively impacted American taxpayers.
“Over the past decade, the federal government sold approximately 195,000 bitcoin for proceeds of $366 million. If the government had held the bitcoin, it would be worth over $17 billion today,” he claimed in an X post. “That’s how much it has cost American taxpayers not to have a long-term strategy.”
He pointed to calculations by Grok, the xAI-developed AI chatbot, as the source of those figures. xAI is an AI company that Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and owner of X, launched in 2023.
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President Donald Trump selected Sacks to serve as the White House AI and crypto czar within his administration in early December. He is also heading up the “Working Group on Digital Asset Markets” that the president formed in January through an executive order.
The executive order tasked the working group with multiple things related to digital assets, including looking into the “potential creation and maintenance of a national digital asset stockpile” and proposing “criteria for establishing such a stockpile, potentially derived from cryptocurrencies lawfully seized by the Federal Government through its law enforcement efforts.”
Over the weekend, Trump indicated he indeed wanted to pursue creating the stockpile.
“A U.S. Crypto Reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden Administration, which is why my Executive Order on Digital Assets directed the Presidential Working Group to move forward on a Crypto Strategic Reserve that includes XRP, SOL, and ADA,” the president said on Truth Social.
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In addition to those tokens, Trump also said Bitcoin and Ether would be the “heart” of the strategic reserve.
Bitcoin has posted a nearly 5.5% jump in price over the past five days. The other cryptocurrencies that Trump mentioned have also seen increases in that timeframe, such as Cardano jumping nearly 41% and XRP rising 19.8%.
The White House is hosting a crypto summit on Friday that the administration said will feature “prominent founders, CEOs, and investors from the crypto industry, as well as members of the president’s Working Group on Digital Assets,” FOX Business previously reported.
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Sacks wrote on X that there was “more to come at the Summit” regarding the cryptocurrency strategic reserve.
The president has said he wants to make America the “Crypto Capital of the World.”
Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.
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