Tennessee's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act is scheduled for a Senate Finance, Ways and Means Committee hearing on April 20, 2026, per a Cointelegraph post on April 17. The bill cleared its prior committee referral and now faces the chamber where most state-level reserve proposals have stalled over the last year.
The measure, sponsored in the House by Representative Barrett as HB1695, would authorize the state treasurer to hold Bitcoin as part of Tennessee's reserve assets. It is one of the few state reserve bills still moving on an active calendar in the 114th General Assembly's session.
What the bill actually authorizes
HB1695 permits, but does not require, the treasurer to allocate up to 10% of the General Fund and the Revenue Fluctuation Reserve to Bitcoin. The purchases are phased: no more than 5% of the fiscal-year budget in any single year until the cumulative cap is reached. That structure is meant to prevent a concentrated buy at a single price point and to spread the acquisition across multiple budget cycles.
The custody language is stricter than most comparable state bills. The treasurer must use a solution with multi-party authorization, and private key material has to be held in cold storage that is both geographically distributed and air-gapped from any network. That rules out any arrangement where a single institution holds all the keys or where signing infrastructure is internet-connected at rest.
If the Finance Committee advances the bill, it still has to pass the full Senate, a matching House version, and survive the governor's desk. The effective date in the current draft is July 1, 2026.
Why the Finance Committee matters more than the prior vote
Earlier Tennessee committee votes dealt with the statutory framework: whether the treasurer has authority, how custody is defined, who audits the holdings. Finance, Ways and Means deals with the actual fiscal impact. That is where similar bills in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Montana slowed or died last year, once fiscal notes estimated the scale of potential exposure.
The committee will have to decide whether authorizing a 10% reserve allocation creates an unfunded liability in future downturns, whether the state's existing accounting rules can classify Bitcoin on the balance sheet, and whether the cold-storage requirement is enforceable without the state building its own custody operation.
Those are not abstract objections. Tennessee's General Fund revenues for fiscal 2025-2026 are in the range of $25 billion, which puts the theoretical ceiling of the program in the low single-digit billions. A 5% annual cap on that ceiling is still a material line item that has to sit somewhere in the state's books.
Where this fits in the state reserve map
More than a dozen states introduced Bitcoin reserve bills in the last 18 months. Most stalled in committee. New Hampshire and Texas passed narrower versions that either capped allocations at single-digit percentages or delegated the decision to existing investment boards. Tennessee's 10% cap is among the most aggressive still in play on an active calendar, and the air-gapped custody rule is one of the most prescriptive.
A federal bill, the BITCOIN Act sponsored by Senator Lummis, proposes a 1-million-coin acquisition program at the Treasury level. That bill has not advanced. For now, the states are running ahead of Washington on the reserve question, and Tennessee is one of the few still in the active-markup phase rather than on an interim study calendar.
What to watch on Monday
Three things will signal whether the bill has real momentum after the hearing. First, whether the fiscal note lands before the vote. A missing fiscal note typically delays rather than kills a bill, but it pushes the decision to a later session. Second, whether the committee amends the 10% cap downward. A cut to 5% or lower would be a survival move, not a policy concession. Third, whether the custody language survives intact. State treasurers' offices have historically pushed back on bill text that locks them into one specific custody architecture.
The bill is not card-adjacent, and the price of Bitcoin (trading around $74,913 as of April 17, 2026, per the market snapshot) is not the variable here. The variable is whether a state finance committee is willing to sign off on a balance-sheet line item that moves with Bitcoin's price. That is a political question, not a technical one.
Overview
Tennessee's HB1695, the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act, goes before the Senate Finance, Ways and Means Committee on April 20, 2026. It would let the treasurer hold up to 10% of the General Fund in Bitcoin, phased in at 5% per year, with multi-party air-gapped custody required. The Finance Committee is the fiscal gate that has killed similar bills in other states. If it clears there, the bill still faces the full Senate, the House, and the governor, with an effective date of July 1, 2026.
