The full legislative text of Congressman Nick Begich's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill is now published online, Bitcoin Magazine flagged on June 5, 2026. The measure, the American Reserve Modernization Act of 2026 (ARMA), was introduced on May 21, but the public text settles questions that the introduction left open. The headline change: it does not require the government to buy a single coin, and anything that lands in the reserve stays there for at least 20 years.
A reserve sourced from seizures, not open-market buys
Earlier strategic-reserve proposals, led by Senator Cynthia Lummis's BITCOIN Act, directed the Treasury to acquire 1 million BTC over five years. ARMA drops that mandate. According to the bill text obtained by The Block, the reserve is filled through "forfeitures, penalties, and other lawful government proceedings" rather than new Treasury purchases on the open market. Any further accumulation is limited to "budget-neutral acquisition strategies," language that tracks the Trump administration's earlier executive order on a bitcoin stockpile.
That distinction matters for the supply story. A federal program buying 1 million coins would have been a standing bid against a fixed 21 million supply. A reserve built from seized assets adds no new demand; it relabels coins the government already controls and bars itself from selling them. The bill also sets up a separate Digital Asset Stockpile inside Treasury for non-bitcoin assets picked up through the same legal channels.
Twenty years before a single coin moves
The lockup is the strictest part of the text. ARMA requires Treasury to hold the bitcoin in the reserve for a minimum of 20 years, barring the government from "selling, swapping, auctioning, encumbering, or otherwise disposing of" the assets for any reason during that window. After the two decades elapse, the Treasury secretary could recommend selling up to 10% of the reserve's holdings in any two-year period.
A 20-year floor is a long commitment by the standards of US fiscal policy, where administrations and congressional majorities turn over every few years. The structure is designed to take the reserve off the table as a tool for short-term budget patching, the way past administrations have drawn down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Whether a future Congress can simply legislate the lockup away is the obvious question, and nothing in a statute binds a later one.
Bitcoin trades in extreme fear as the text lands
The timing is awkward for a confidence signal. Bitcoin changed hands at $62,224 as of June 5, 2026, down 2.3% on the day and 14.7% over the past week, according to CoinMarketCap data in our market snapshot. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index sat at 17, deep in "Extreme Fear." Ether was off 5.8% on the day at $1,674, and the broader market was red across the board.
A reserve that neither buys nor sells does little to change that tape in the near term. The policy point is structural, not a price catalyst: codifying federal bitcoin holdings in statute, rather than leaving them to an executive order that the next president can rescind. For holders in the United States, the value is in permanence, a reserve that survives a change of administration carries more weight than one that depends on who occupies the White House.
A bipartisan sponsor list and a crowded agenda
Begich (R-AK) co-leads the bill with Democrat Jared Golden (ME-02), and 16 original co-sponsors signed on at introduction, a roster that runs from Buddy Carter and Ben Cline to Mike Lawler and Pat Harrigan. Bipartisan framing gives the measure a better starting position than a party-line bill, though co-sponsorship is not the same as floor votes.
Begich cast the legislation as a way to lead "confidently" in the digital age while "protecting taxpayer interests, strengthening financial sovereignty, and reinforcing the principles of transparency." The forfeiture-funded, no-purchase design is the part that lets supporters make the taxpayer-neutral argument: the government is not spending appropriated dollars to speculate on an asset that just fell 15% in a week.
ARMA now joins a packed crypto docket on Capitol Hill, alongside the CLARITY Act market-structure push and a separate House effort on crypto tax rules. Publishing the full text moves the reserve idea from press-release stage to a readable bill, but committee markup, scoring, and floor time all remain ahead of it.
Overview
ARMA's published text confirms a more restrained version of the strategic-reserve idea than earlier proposals. The 1 million BTC purchase mandate is gone, replaced by a reserve built from forfeited and seized coins, locked for at least 20 years, with sales capped at 10% per two-year period after that. It is bipartisan, taxpayer-neutral by design, and now public in full, but it still has to clear committee and the floor. The reserve buys nothing and sells nothing for two decades, so the near-term market effect is minimal; the significance is in writing federal bitcoin holdings into law rather than leaving them to executive discretion.
