Florida plans to remove state Bitcoin reserve, Ethereum and XRP for the time being
- Florida is planning a state Bitcoin reserve led by the CFO.
- A 500 billion US dollar hurdle currently means that only Bitcoin can be purchased.
Florida is introducing new legislation that would allow the state to establish a state-managed Bitcoin reserve. The reserve will be managed by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), with clear rules for custody, reporting requirements and a market capitalization hurdle that currently limits the selection to just Bitcoin.
The push follows an earlier Florida bill from 2025 that would allow public funds to be invested in Bitcoin. This bill limited the allocation to up to 10 percent and also provided for Bitcoin payments to the government and the lending of holdings to generate additional income. However, the project got stuck in a committee.
Those submitted now Legislative proposals shift the focus: Instead of a broad investment mandate across several public funds, the focus is on building a reserve structure that is accumulated through legal allocations of funds.
Is the Bitcoin Reserve coming to Florida?
House Bill 1039, filed Jan. 6, establishes the Florida Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve as a special fund outside the state treasury, with custody and management at the CFO. The reserve can include not only purchased stocks, but also crypto assets that arise from forks or are distributed to government addresses via airdrop. Current income, interest or rewards should also end up in the reserve.
Senate Bill 1040 regulates the trust fund side: It creates the “Florida Cryptocurrency Reserve” as a trust fund in the CFO Office and defines the purpose of “acquiring, holding, managing and disposing of crypto assets”, including to strengthen financial resilience and as a “potential hedge against inflation and economic volatility”. At the same time, the draft contains a time limit: without another legal extension, the trust fund will end on July 1, 2030.
Both HB 1039 and SB 1038 attach a hard threshold to purchases. A cryptocurrency can only be purchased if it has had an average market capitalization of at least $500 billion over the last 24 months.
This formally refers to “crypto assets”, but in fact only Bitcoin qualifies. Ethereum currently has a market capitalization of around $373 billion and would need to exceed the limit for two years (on average) before ETH would be an option. XRP would have to multiply its market cap of around $127 billion to reach the threshold.
What is also interesting is that the bill requires that private keys be available exclusively from the state, not accessible via smartphones, located in at least two geographically separate, secure data centers, and that transactions be authorized via a multi-party governance model.
The CFO may also engage third parties for custody, liquidity execution and independent audits and, if he deems it appropriate, may also use derivatives for purchases.
An Advisory Committee is provided for political control. And: By December 31st of every even calendar year at the latest, the CFO should publish a report that shows inventory quantities, an estimate, inventory changes and the management measures of the period.
Whether Florida has a state Bitcoin reserve in its second attempt now depends on whether the drafts make it through committees this time, while the size and timing of actual purchases will be decided by Florida’s CFO.
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