White House crypto advisor Patrick Witt said the Trump administration will announce new details on the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve within “the next few weeks,” framing the update as both a policy milestone and a custody response after an alleged exploit involving digital assets held by the US Marshals Service.
Speaking at Consensus 2026 in Miami on Wednesday, Witt said the administration’s work on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, or SBR, and the separate digital asset stockpile had been progressing largely out of public view. The next announcement, he indicated, will focus on “exactly the progress that’s been made and where we’re going from here.”
Trump’s Bitcoin Reserve Heads Toward New Update
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a US Digital Asset Stockpile, with the bitcoin reserve capitalized by BTC finally forfeited to the Treasury through criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings. The non-bitcoin stockpile covers other forfeited digital assets under a separate framework.
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Witt tied the coming update directly to a recent security incident. “So, as many of the folks in this room may have seen, there was an exploit of certain assets that were held by the US Marshals just a month or two ago. We obviously started the work on the SBR, the digital asset stockpile, without thinking about that, but obviously thinking about we need to properly secure these assets. So it’s a case in point for why it was so necessary that the President established the SBR and that he instructed the agencies to take these assets very seriously and properly safeguard them.”
He added that digital asset custody creates challenges that do not fit neatly into legacy government asset-management procedures. “Custody is unique for digital assets. So we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress that’s kind of happened in the background and we’ll be making an announcement in the next few weeks, you know, laying out exactly the progress that’s been made and where we’re going from here.”
The exploit Witt referenced appears to be the alleged theft tied to John Daghita, also known online as “John” or “Lick.” The case became public after blockchain investigator ZachXBT linked the “John/Lick” persona to wallets moving funds connected to US government-controlled crypto addresses. TRM Labs later said Daghita was arrested in Saint Martin in a joint operation involving the French Gendarmerie and the FBI, with authorities alleging he stole cryptocurrency from wallets associated with the US Marshals Service.
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According to TRM’s summary, the investigation traced part of the activity to cryptocurrency seized in connection with the 2016 Bitfinex hack. TRM said approximately $24.9 million of the traced funds originated from a US government-controlled wallet, while ZachXBT alleged that Daghita stole more than $46 million in seized crypto assets by abusing access at CMDSS, his father’s company, which held a US Marshals Service contract.
Notably, Witt had already previewed the update days earlier at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas. Speaking on a panel at The Venetian Resort, he said the administration had spent months working through the legal interpretations needed to protect bitcoin on the government balance sheet after Trump’s executive order. “In the next few weeks, we’ll be making a big announcement,” Witt said there, adding that the administration believed it could take a “big step forward from the executive branch side” even before Congress acts.
He also made clear at Bitcoin 2026 that legislation would still be needed to lock the policy in more permanently. That distinction is central: an executive-branch framework can shape custody and management now, but a statutory framework would be harder for a future administration to unwind.
At press time, BTC traded at $81,530.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
