(Kitco News) – New Hampshire has become the first U.S. state to pass a crypto reserve bill, enabling the Granite State to invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and the same legislation allows the state government to invest in gold and silver.
Governor Kelly Ayotte announced the signing on May 6 after the legislature passed it earlier, saying the bill would enable the state to “invest in cryptocurrency and precious metals.”
New Hampshire is once again First in the Nation! 🎉
Just signed a new law allowing our state to invest in cryptocurrency and precious metals. pic.twitter.com/ua9bawZKbM— Governor Kelly Ayotte (@KellyAyotte) May 6, 2025
While other states allow gold as a reserve asset, New Hampshire is the first U.S. state to do the same for crypto after the governor of Arizona vetoed a similar bill on May 2, and two crypto bills were withdrawn in Florida on May 3.
House Bill 302, introduced in New Hampshire in January, authorizes the state treasury to use funds to invest in cryptocurrencies as long as the tokens have a market capitalization of more than $500 billion – a stipulation that precludes many smaller projects and memecoins.
“The Live Free or Die state is leading the way in forging the future of commerce and digital assets,” New Hampshire’s Republican party wrote in a May 6 post.
While the New Hampshire bill puts crypto and gold on equal footing, the Trump administration appears to be privileging digital assets over precious metals.
Bo Hines, the Executive Director of the Presidential Working Group on Digital Assets, suggested in a March interview that revaluing government gold was one of the proposals on the table to fund the U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
“We view Bitcoin as being digital gold,” Hines told Coindesk’s Christine Lee at the Blockworks Digital Asset Summit in New York City. “That's why we set up the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in the way that we did. It has intrinsic stored value that's traditionally accepted, and we feel like it's in the best interest of Americans to hold on to this asset long-term and accumulate as much as we can get.”
“That's why we've likened this to digital gold and talked about building the digital Fort Knox for the United States,” he added.
And the Trump administration appears to be considering the contents of the original Fort Knox to fund the digital one.
Later in the interview, Lee pointed out that Trump’s executive order suggests acquiring Bitcoin for the reserve in a budget-neutral way. “Senator Cynthia Lummis has reintroduced the Bitcoin Act, suggesting that Fed earnings and gold certificates could be used to acquire Bitcoin. What methods are on the table here?”
“I think that Senator Lummis is really moving the ball forward on Capitol Hill, not only with the [Strategic Bitcoin Reserve], but many other initiatives as well,” Hines replied. “She has a very interesting idea about a budget-neutral way in which we could acquire more. She talks about the gold certificates dating back to the 1970s, which we could realize their actual value today, and use that to purchase more Bitcoin. That's just one creative way.”
“We're going to have these conversations with the interagency working group that was set up and, we'll sort through and flesh out the best ideas and decide how we're going to implement this,” he added. “But we're going to do that in short order. We want to move quickly.”
