Which States Have a Bitcoin Reserve, and What Each Law Actually Says
The question sounds like it has a list for an answer, and it does. New Hampshire, Texas, Arizona.
The list is also the least informative part of the answer, because the three laws have almost nothing in common beyond the headline. One is an investment authority. One is a fund held outside the state treasury. One is an unclaimed property statute. Reading them side by side is more useful than counting them.
New Hampshire: the law that does not mention bitcoin
New Hampshire’s provision lives at RSA 6:8-d, “Strategic Reserve Established”, added by chapter 4 of the Laws of 2025 and effective 5 July 2025.
Here is the operative sentence:
“Notwithstanding RSA 6:8, the state treasurer may invest a portion of public funds in precious metals and any digital assets with a market capitalization of over $500 billion averaged over the previous calendar year from the general fund, the revenue stabilization fund established in RSA 9:13-e, and any other funds as authorized by the legislature.”
Three things in one sentence, and all three matter.
It is a threshold, not a name. The statute does not say bitcoin. It says any digital asset above 500 billion dollars of market capitalization, averaged over the previous calendar year. Today that test admits a very short list. It is written to keep admitting whatever passes it later, without the legislature having to return.
Precious metals are in the same clause. New Hampshire did not write a crypto law. It wrote an alternative-assets law and put gold, silver, platinum and large-capitalization digital assets in one authority. That framing is the argument the state made to itself.
“May”, not “shall”. Paragraph III caps it: “The state treasurer shall not invest more than 5 percent of the total amount of public funds in any of the authorized investments under paragraph II.” A ceiling, and no floor. New Hampshire’s treasurer is permitted to buy nothing at all and remain in full compliance.
The part of the statute nobody quotes
Paragraph IV requires that any digital assets be held directly by the treasurer through a “secure custody solution”, by a qualified custodian, or as an exchange traded product. And then the definitions section says what a secure custody solution has to be. In statute:
“(1) The cryptographic private keys that secure digital assets are exclusively known by and accessible by the government entity. (2) The cryptographic private keys that secure digital assets are exclusively contained within an encrypted environment and accessible only via end-to-end encrypted channels. (3) The cryptographic private keys that secure digital assets are never contained by, accessible by, or controllable via a smartphone. (4) Any hardware that contains the cryptographic private keys that secure digital assets is maintained in at least 2 geographically diversified specially designated secure data centers. (5) The secure custody solution enforces a multi-party governance structure for authorizing transactions, enforces user access controls, and logs all user-initiated actions.”
Read (3) again. The Revised Statutes of New Hampshire contain a sentence about smartphones and private keys. Requirement (4) sets a minimum of two geographically separated data centers, and the list continues into disaster recovery, code audits and penetration testing.
This is the most operationally specific crypto text in any of the three laws, and it is the part that never appears in coverage. Whatever else one thinks of the policy, somebody who understood key management was in the room.
Source, read in full:
Texas: the one that actually bought something
Texas SB 21, the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Investment Act, took effect immediately on 20 June 2025. The Legislature’s own caption:
“Relating to the establishment and administration of the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for the purpose of investing in cryptocurrency and the investment authority of the comptroller of public accounts over the reserve and certain other state funds.”
Named asset, named officer, effective on signature. Of the three, this is the one that reads like what people picture.
You will read that Texas passed two. The second, HB 4488, has this caption:
“Relating to the creation and re-creation of funds and accounts, the dedication and rededication of revenue and allocation of accrued interest on dedicated revenue, and the exemption of unappropriated money from use for general governmental purposes.”
It is the biennial funds-consolidation bill. The word bitcoin appears in it exactly once, in a list of five funds exempted from the sweep:
“(4) the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve created as a fund outside the state treasury by Senate Bill No. 21 or similar legislation”
Item four of five, between a water fund and a film incentive fund.
That single line does carry weight, and it is the source of the reporting that the reserve has unusual legal protection. But the mechanism is duller and more interesting than “a second bitcoin law”: Texas put the reserve on the routine list of funds that survive consolidation, which is how a state protects a fund without anybody voting on the fund itself.
Note also the six words inside the citation: created as a fund outside the state treasury. The reserve is not a treasury account.
Source, read in full:
What Texas has bought, as reported
The following is reported, not verified from the Comptroller’s own records. Legislation dedicated 10 million dollars to the reserve. The Comptroller’s office is reported to have made a first purchase of about 5 million dollars, described as a placeholder, dated by some accounts to 20 November 2025 and confirmed in early December, and to have added a second 5 million in December, bringing the holding to about 10 million.
One detail in that account deserves more attention than it gets. The purchase was reported as a stake in a spot bitcoin exchange traded product rather than bitcoin. If that is right, then the first American state bitcoin reserve holds shares in a trust, which is a different asset with a different custodian and a different set of risks. New Hampshire’s statute expressly permits that structure. Whether it is what voters pictured is a separate question.
Arizona: a reserve that is filled by abandonment
Arizona is on every list, and Arizona’s law is the one least like the others.
HB 2749 became chapter 150 of the Laws of 2025, signed 7 May 2025. Its official short title, on the Arizona Senate’s own fact sheet, is “unclaimed property; virtual currency; security”. The fact sheet’s statement of purpose:
“Establishes a process to deem digital assets as abandoned property and for a holder to deliver the abandoned property to the Arizona Department of Revenue (ADOR). Establishes the Bitcoin and Digital Assets Reserve Fund (Fund) consisting of abandoned digital assets for which three years have passed after the date the abandoned digital assets were transferred to a qualified custodian, if the abandoned digital assets remain unclaimed.”
The statute itself describes what else goes in:
“the bitcoin and digital assets reserve fund is established consisting of any airdrops, staking rewards or interest earned as prescribed in SECTION 44-308, subsection D.”
Abandoned property, plus whatever that property earns while the state holds it. There is no appropriation and no purchase authority. Arizona’s reserve grows when Arizonans lose track of crypto, and not otherwise.
There is one more clause worth quoting, because it is doing something specific:
“On approval of the legislature, the state treasurer shall deposit … ten percent of the DIGITAL assets held in the fund in the state general fund. The legislature may not deposit bitcoin in the state general fund.”
Ten percent of the digital assets may be moved into the general fund and spent. Bitcoin may not. Bitcoin stays in the reserve. Arizona wrote a law in which the altcoins are budget revenue and the bitcoin is a reserve.
That is not for want of trying. The bill Arizona is usually credited with, a strategic bitcoin reserve act that would have allowed purchases, was Senate Bill 1025, and it was vetoed. So was SB 1373, a close predecessor, on the reasoning that crypto volatility did not suit general fund dollars. The one that survived is the unclaimed property bill.
The 2026 session tried again with SB 1649, which would have created a digital assets strategic reserve fund seeded from seized and forfeited crypto, at no new cost to taxpayers. It cleared the Senate and moved through the House, and then failed on House third reading on 9 June 2026. It never reached the Governor.
This publication has covered that sequence in detail in its Arizona instalment, .
Sources, read in full: Arizona Laws 2025, chapter 150, https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/57leg/1R/laws/0150.htm and the Arizona Senate fact sheet for H.B. 2749, https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/57leg/1R/summary/S.2749GOV.DOCX.htm
What the three have in common
Very little, and the one thing they share is the thing the coverage misses.
New Hampshire
Texas
Arizona
Instrument
Investment authority, RSA 6:8-d
Dedicated fund, SB 21
Unclaimed property fund, ch. 150
Names bitcoin
No, uses a $500bn market cap test
Yes, in the title
Yes, in the fund’s name
Source of assets
Public funds, treasurer’s discretion
Legislative dedication
Abandoned property, airdrops, staking
Obliged to buy
No
No
No
Cap
5% of total public funds
Set by appropriation
Not applicable
Custody written into law
Yes, in unusual detail
No
Qualified custodian referenced
Not one of the three obliges the state to acquire anything. New Hampshire’s treasurer may invest and may decline. Texas received a dedication rather than a mandate. Arizona has no purchase power at all.
That is the finding. “Which states have a bitcoin reserve” is a question about authority, and authority is not the same as a position. Two of the three states on the list could hold zero bitcoin indefinitely and be fully in compliance with their own laws.
What this piece could not establish
A complete national count. Three enactments were verified against primary text. Whether a fourth state enacted something in a 2026 session was not established here, because doing that properly means reading fifty legislatures rather than trusting a tracker, and no authoritative free tracker was available to stand in.
If you see a longer list, the question to ask about each new entry is the one this piece asks about the first three: what does the statute oblige the state to do? On the evidence so far, the answer is usually nothing, and that is not a criticism of the laws. It is what an authority is.
One state legislated in the other direction
Worth holding next to the three. Connecticut passed a law that bars the state from holding a bitcoin reserve at all, which this publication covered in .
A list of states with reserves, read on its own, suggests a one-way trend. The full picture is that states are moving in both directions, and at least one has written the prohibition into law.
The series this belongs to
This is the round-up for State-of-Crypto, which reads one state’s digital asset law at a time, from the state’s own text. Published so far:
