Bitcoin Magazine has published an in-studio interview with Senator Bill Hagerty examining the expansion of the U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and the future of U.S. dollar hegemony. The full conversation is available on YouTube.

The reserve at the center of that discussion was created by executive order in March 2025 and is stocked with bitcoin the federal government already holds — roughly 200,000 coins, most of them forfeited through enforcement actions. How — and whether — to grow that stockpile is the policy question Hagerty takes up.

Hagerty says the only answer some in Congress have is a central bank digital currency (CBDC), an approach he called “absolutely not consistent with freedom and liberty.” Unlike the privately issued, dollar-backed stablecoins at the heart of recent U.S. legislation, a CBDC would be a direct liability of the Federal Reserve — a structural difference that sits at the core of the CBDC debate.

In the interview, he explains how regulatory uncertainty allowed former SEC Chair Gary Gensler to attack the industry, why a light government touch helps innovation thrive, and what Congress can realistically accomplish before the new session begins in January. Gensler chaired the SEC from 2021 to 2025, a period when the agency pursued crypto companies largely through enforcement actions in the absence of comprehensive market-structure legislation — the regulatory gap Hagerty is pointing to.

Two pieces of legislation frame much of the conversation: the Clarity Act, a market-structure bill that passed the House in July 2025 and now awaits Senate action, and the GENIUS Act, signed into law the same month to create the first federal framework for payment stablecoins. Because those stablecoins hold reserves largely in short-term U.S. Treasuries, their growth is often cited as a potential source of demand for U.S. debt — the linkage behind the interview's discussion of Treasury demand and dollar dominance. The energy angle runs through TVA, the federally chartered Tennessee Valley Authority that supplies power across much of Hagerty's home state.

The discussion covers the following topics:

• 00:00 — Senator Bill Hagerty on what's next for the Clarity Act
• 01:38 — Democrats, ethics provisions and the stablecoin rewards debate
• 03:04 — How the SEC and CFTC are regulating crypto without Congress
• 04:43 — How the GENIUS Act will change payments and settlement
• 07:08 — Stablecoins, Treasury demand and U.S. dollar dominance
• 08:31 — The U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and 200,000 bitcoin
• 10:54 — Why Americans are still skeptical of crypto
• 13:18 — Bitcoin mining, TVA and Tennessee's energy buildout
• 17:14 — Bitcoin businesses in Nashville and why CBDCs threaten freedom
• 18:36 — What Congress can pass before the new session in January

This post, “Senator Bill Hagerty: Expanding the U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, & the Future of Dollar Hegemony,” first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

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