Strategic reserve: Representations of cryptocurrencies in an illustration. Participants are rushing to reestablish long positions as Trump’s comments serve as a spectacular tailwind for prices. — Reuters
WASHINGTON: The cryptocurrency market roared into March with a rally, recouping some of the losses from the asset class’s worst month since 2022, after President Donald Trump once again talked up his plan for a strategic crypto reserve.
The inclusion of XRP and ADA tokens in Trump’s plan were surprising, according to Andrew Tu, head of sales at crypto market maker Efficient Frontier.
Both tokens had huge rallies last Sunday, leading gains across most digital assets.
Trump also said bitcoin, ether and solana would be included in the reserve, helping those coins recover some of last month’s steep declines.
The announcements from Trump, which were made in posts on Truth Social, reconfirmed his loyalty to an industry that had showered him with donations and praise during his campaign following a crackdown on crypto companies under former president Joe Biden’s administration.
Still, many of the details of Trump’s plan are unknown, including how much the government will actually buy and how the purchases would be funded.
“If expectations don’t meet reality, then markets can potentially retreat again,” Tu said.
“For now, all the bearishness of the past week has been forgotten by markets,” he said, while adding that macroeconomic concerns are still an overhang that could cause crypto prices to retreat again should equities do the same.
The tokens Trump said would be included in the reserve are all among the top eight cryptocurrencies by market value, according to tracker CoinMarketCap.com.
The only ones among the top eight that weren’t included were tether and USDC, stablecoins that track the US dollar, and the Binance exchange’s token Binance Coin, known as BNB.
Trump had vowed to create a strategic bitcoin reserve on the campaign trail, one of many crypto-related promises that helped fuel a surge in prices up until the day of his inauguration.
While the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has dropped several cases and investigations into crypto companies in the early weeks of the Trump administration, little had been said about a strategic reserve since he took office.
David Sacks, the president’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar, said on Feb 4 that administration officials still needed to study the feasibility of the plan.
Trump’s crypto-related executive order – issued in January – didn’t mention any specific tokens and referred only to the possibility of a “national digital asset stockpile”, the potential creation and maintenance of which should be evaluated by a White House working group.
The lack of an explicit mention of bitcoin in the January executive order disappointed some of the largest digital token’s most outspoken supporters, who had spent months anticipating a “bitcoin Fort Knox”.
Bitcoin had fallen as much as 28% from its last record above US$109,000 on Jan 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration, through last Friday.
It posted an 18% drop in February. The Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index sank 28% in February, its worst month since the “crypto winter” of 2022 that included the failure of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange.
In a Truth Social post last Sunday, Trump said the executive order on crypto “directed the Presidential Working Group to move forward on a crypto strategic reserve that includes XRP, SOL and ADA.”
A second Truth Social post, published a little more than an hour later, added: “obviously, BTC and ETH, as other valuable cryptocurrencies, will be at the heart of the reserve. I also love bitcoin and ethereum.”
Bitcoin jumped 9% to above the US$94,000 level last Sunday afternoon in New York. Ether, the second-largest digital token, rallied nearly 13% to above US$2,500.
Cardano, the cryptocurrency commonly known by its symbol ADA, surged more than 50% following the posts. SOL, short for the solana blockchain’s namesake token, jumped more than 20% and the ripple-associated XRP rallied 30%.
Trump’s comments “have resulted in participants rushing to reestablish long positions and are serving as a spectacular tailwind for prices,” said Spencer Hallarn, global head of over-the-counter trading at crypto investment firm GSR.
San Francisco-based Ripple Labs was sued in 2020 by the SEC, which claimed the company was offering unregistered securities.
A US district court later found that XRP was a security when sold to institutional investors but not when sold to retail investors, which was seen as a win in the crypto industry.
The SEC appealed that ruling. While the SEC has wiped clean its slate of many crypto enforcement actions, the Ripple appeal has not yet been dropped. — Bloomberg
