Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder said the U.S. crypto reserves should be just Bitcoin
for now, despite calls for other cryptocurrencies to be included, including by President Trump.
"Maybe this goes against what you think my allegiances were, but I actually would, as a first priority, think that the reserve should just be Bitcoin. I think that that's non-controversial and it's hard to argue against," Goldfeder said on The Crypto Beat podcast on March 7 ahead of the Crypto Summit.
While Trump signed an order on March 6 to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve of seized assets, he just last week called for a crypto reserve to include other tokens such as XRP, Solana and Cardano.
Yet Goldfeder argued that Bitcoin has differentiated itself in a universally accepted way and that it would be the cleanest and easiest move to focus only on it. He said there are dangers of allowing other assets in, since regulators don't know the intricacies of all cryptocurrencies and who's pushing for each one to be included.
"I think we can just cut that off, but still accomplish basically everything by having Bitcoin be there, which makes sense as an asset, right?" Goldfeder said.
While this would exclude Arbitrum's native token, ARB, Goldfeder noted that it could still be considered for any initiative focused on American-made cryptocurrencies. He noted that Arbitrum's developers came from Princeton University and that its initial development took place at Offchain Labs, a U.S.-based company that remains headquartered there.
"So certainly I think Arbitrum should be high up on that list if we're going down that path of American assets," said Goldfeder. "But ultimately, I think just Bitcoin will be cleaner, just an easy way for the community that we can all rally around."