American states jockey in BTC reserve race

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It was a few weeks back I wrote about new proposed bills in Texas and Oklahoma focused on crypto investments. They joined plenty of states with similar plans — i.e. Pennsylvania , New Hampshire and others. 

More recently, Caylin Young, a delegate in Maryland’s state legislature, proposed establishing a bitcoin reserve fund. There appears to be a hearing on this slated for March 6.

The bill would allow the state treasurer to invest funds obtained through enforcing certain gambling violations toward the crypto asset, according to a proposal synopsis . 

In Kentucky, House Bill 376 was introduced to “authorize the State Investment Commission to make investments in certain digital assets and bullion.” 

The bill does not mention BTC specifically. But it does note stablecoins (with appropriate US approval) and digital assets (ex stablecoins) with a market cap exceeding $750 billion over the previous calendar year.

That market cap figure is used in Iowa’s House File 246, too — legislation also introduced last week.

This comes after a proposal in Utah allowing the state to allocate up to 5% of certain public funds to crypto moved on to the state senate. Contrarily, North Dakota’s House rejected a similar plan.  

ProChain Capital’s David Tawil wrote in a Sunday email that the strategic bitcoin reserve race “is on and it is real.”

“The largest investors in the world (municipalities, pension funds and nation-states) are going [to] compete to accumulate bitcoin as a digital gold, to serve as a safe haven reserve asset and, in the case of nations, to combat deflation in their own currencies,” he wrote.

Though specifics around the federal government’s possible BTC-buying plans remain unknown for now, there’ll be plenty to watch at the state-level.

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