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A rally in digital assets faded Monday despite new promises from Donald Trump about a US strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies.
The president said Sunday in a social media post on Truth Social that such a reserve would include bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), XRP (XRP), solana (SOL), and cardano (ADA). He had not previously spelled out which digital assets would be included.
The new disclosure sent the value of these digital assets soaring through Monday morning, reversing a slump that had taken hold in recent weeks and accelerated last week as bitcoin experienced its worst correction since a 2022 meltdown.
By Monday afternoon, the rally all but faded. Bitcoin's price, which had jumped above 94,000 following Trump’s Sunday post, dipped 9% on Monday below $86,000 as of the afternoon.
The world's largest cryptocurrency is currently down 21% from its all-time high above $109,000 the day of Trump's inauguration in January.
The world's second-largest cryptocurrency, ether (ETH), is also down more than 15% over the past 24 hours. XRP (XRP) and Cardano's ADA coin (ADA) are each down 17% while Solana (SOL) fell 18%.
The strategic reserve idea is one of Trump's biggest promises to the crypto world, something he touted while on the campaign trail last year while pledging to make the US the "crypto capital of the planet."
The president signed a crypto-focused executive order in January that called for a newly formed presidential working group on digital assets to "evaluate the potential creation and maintenance of a national digital asset stockpile."
It also said the group would propose "criteria for establishing such a stockpile, potentially derived from cryptocurrencies lawfully seized by the Federal Government through its law enforcement efforts."
"We're still in the very early stages of this, but that's one of the first things we're going to look at is the feasibility of a bitcoin reserve," Trump's AI and crypto czar David Sacks said in early February.
The inclusion of solana, XRP, and cardano to that reserve would be a major boost for those digital currencies, which don’t carry as much support on Wall Street as bitcoin or ether.
It is not yet clear how it would work exactly or whether it would require an act of Congress.
More details may be available this Friday at a crypto summit, where Trump is expected to deliver a speech.
What would need congressional approval is a US government crypto-buying program discussed by Sen. Cynthia Lummis, which would call for the Federal Reserve to purchase more bitcoin using 1970s-era certificates for gold reserves.