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U.S. bitcoin reserve may sound a bit far-fetched, but countries around the world have already been stockpiling stranger things — such as helium, maple syrup and cheese.
These strategic reserves have been key to protecting the markets for specific resources that matter a lot to these countries. And late Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve and a separate digital-asset stockpile for cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin, the night before his first White House crypto summit on Friday.
Read more: Trump signs order establishing strategic bitcoin reserve. But it’s not what crypto industry ultimately wants.
“Reserves of commodities have played important roles in economics as well as national security,” said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group.
For generations, for example, global central banks have kept gold was built to “protect against foreign adversaries cutting off our supply as well as service disruptions due to storms,” Flynn noted.
Some of these more unusual reserves include: stockpiles of cheese and helium in the U.S.; maple syrup in Canada; and a seed vault in Norway to protect against the loss of crop diversity.
“Many of these reserves have served a real purpose,” said Adam Koos, president and senior financial adviser at Libertas Wealth Management Group. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been tapped multiple times
in response to oil crises, for instance, while Canada’s maple-syrup reserve can prevent price crashes from overproduction, he said.
Meanwhile, China’s pork reserves helped stabilize supply when swine flu decimated China’s pig population, said Koos. Even the U.S. cheese reserve, “while it sounds absurd, played a role in supporting dairy farmers when the market was oversaturated.”
Here’s a closer look at each of these strategic stockpiles.
The U.S. stockpile of cheese CSCJ25
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came as a result of efforts by the government to stabilize dairy prices and help farmers.
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter’s administration set a subsidy policy that poured $2 billion into the dairy industry over four years to help boost low prices for dairy at the time, according to History, part of the A&E Networks family of brands.
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as they could to take advantage of the government support. The government then purchased the milk that dairy farmers couldn’t sell, processing it into cheese, butter and dehydrated milk powder. The stockpile of cheese, which has a longer shelf life, eventually rose to more than 500 million pounds and was stored in hundreds of warehouses.
Officials weren’t sure how long the shelf life was for the product, however, so 300 million pounds of cheese from the stockpile was eventually handed out to the needy under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
The latest Cold Storage report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture — which surveys the amount of goods in storage in commercial and public warehouses — showed that total natural cheese stocks in all warehouses totaled 1.374 billion pounds as of Jan. 31. A report from the Visual Capitalist citing USDA and IMF data claims much of the stockpile consists of cheddar, American and Swiss cheeses.
When asked whether the U.S. government owned the cheese stocks in cold storage, a spokesman for the USDA said the agency was “required by law to maintain respondent and data privacy, and cannot reveal individual operations, producers, ranchers or facilities.” But some reports say the stocks are not government-owned, but are instead owned commercially by those who are part of the supply chain.
Canada is home to the world’s only maple-syrup reserve, created by Québec maple producers. It ensures a constant supply to the national and international markets regardless of the success of any year’s harvest,
according to Producteurs et productrices acéricoles du Québec (PPAQ) — or in English, Quebec Maple Syrup Producers. It also “stabilizes product prices, and eliminates the swings typically caused by shortage or surplus.”
The syrup is stored in three warehouses with a combined capacity of 133 million pounds, or 216,000 barrels. In total, they can hold the equivalent of 53 Olympic-sized swimming pools of syrup. At full capacity, that would represent a value of 400 million Canadian dollars
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The reserve currently holds 45 million liters, Joël Vaudeville, a spokesman for PPAQ, told MarketWatch. That roughly
equates to roughly 130.95 million pounds of maple syrup.
“The Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve has been fully fulfilling its role since its creation in 2000,” said Vaudeville.
When a maple season produces more maple syrup than consumer demand warrants in Canada and on international markets, then the surplus is put into inventory in the reserve, he noted. “When maple production is insufficient to meet demand, the syrup in reserve is used to make up for it.”
In fact, the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve was actually the victim of “malicious individuals” who orchestrated a maple-syrup theft in 2011 and 2012, said Vaudeville. Nearly 7 million pounds of syrup were stolen at the time —
worth around C$18 million, or over $12 million today. Much of it was recovered, but insurance covered the remaining value, and various security measures were then put in place, he said.
Despite
the
“Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist,” Canada’s maple-syrup reserve might be the “best example of a unique working reserve,” said Ben Newsom, an analyst at Darin Newsom Analysis, which provides commodity commentary and analysis. It has historically been proven to provide stability not only to the producers but also to the consumers in the syrup market, he said.
China’s emergency pork stockpile
China’s pork reserve was created in the 1970s as a tool for controlling price swings. It’s unclear how big the reserve is today, as the Chinese government keeps the stockpile’s exact size a secret, but China’s commerce ministry claimed it had grown to around
200,000 tons in 2019.
The Chinese government has released some of its pork reserves sporadically over the last several years to stabilize prices at times when the meat supply was low. The government drew on pork reserves when a
swine fever swept through the country’s pig population in 2019, for example. And it has also
tapped its pork stockpile ahead of major festivals and holidays like the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Spring Festival, when the popular protein would be in high demand.
China’s pork stockpile is owned and managed by the government, namely the
National Development and Reform Commission. The pork stockpile is not centrally located, but rather stored in different warehouses throughout the nation.
The U.S. helium pipeline
While most people may associate helium with birthday balloons, the gas also plays a pivotal role in various
medical-testing (such as MRIs), manufacturing and aerospace applications. And the U.S. has been a major producer of the nonflammable gas.
In fact, a helium reserve located in a giant underground pipeline spanning Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas has supplied 30% of the world’s helium,
according to reports. Overall, the stockpile had 1.49 billion cubic feet of helium in storage as of 2023, according to
United States Geological Survey.
Then last year, the U.S. completed a sale of the remainder of its helium reserve to
industrial-gas company Messer for $460 million.
From the archives: Helium is rallying off a decade-long shortage — and it’s time for investors to pay attention
“The sale of the Federal Helium System and subsequent transfer of funds marks the end of an era and a successful transition to private industry,” Melanie Barnes, the New Mexico state director for the Bureau of Land Management, said in a December 2024
statement.
“The Department of the Interior and the BLM commend the efforts of all involved in this process, including ensuring that maximum value was obtained as part of this historic shift.”
Norway’s Arctic Seed Vault
Norway keeps a stash of over 1 million seeds in a vault near the North Pole.
The Norwegian government founded the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in 2008 as a
“global backstop” and “insurance policy” to safeguard seeds for mankind’s future food supply, its website notes.
The vault, which is located in the Arctic Circle, has approximately 1.3 million seed samples for food crops, including rice RR00
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The goal is to protect seed duplicates to conserve planet genetic diversity, which is the foundation of global food production.
And because seeds are stored most optimally at minus 18 degrees Celsius, the Arctic Circle is the perfect place for the seed vault because the region’s permafrost and thick rock ensure that the seed samples will remain frozen, even without power.
Many have dubbed this marvel a “doomsday” vault because its contents would be (mostly) only necessary if a global catastrophe or natural disaster were to occur that would threaten the food supply.
The seeds inside the vault are still owned by depositors and not the Norwegian government.
So what about crypto reserves?
Central banks around the globe have loaded up on record amounts of gold to give their governments a store of wealth, and cryptocurrencies
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could serve the same purpose if accepted as kind of a digital gold, said Flynn of the Price Futures Group.
And it would be much easier to move crypto than gold, he noted. The gold market, for example, saw a run on gold, with the physical bullion leaving London and going to the U.S. because of the differential in prices, Flynn said. It would be much easier to move digital currencies in the crypto universe. “You wouldn’t have to put it on planes and trains, and you wouldn’t need armed guards to protect it,” he said.
Many countries have viewed their store of gold and silver as a measurement of their wealth, “but those relics may soon change in this digital world where everything has become electronic,” said Flynn. Cryptocurrencies could replace some of those “old relics in the financial system.”
But there are some skeptics. Darin Newsom, president of Darin Newsom Analysis Inc., said a cryptocurrency reserve is “not necessary” yet.
“The world isn’t moving to an all-crypto system anytime soon,” he said. ”But again, if it creates a run on [these] currencies, someone in particular holds [who] holds a large amount … will make a lot of money.”
Plus, a core principle behind any strategic reserve is reducing volatility — and crypto is known for being more volatile, said Ben Newsom, also of Darin Newsom Analysis.
“You can argue that because cryptocurrencies have a finite supply, much like precious metals, they might serve as an inflation hedge and, in the event of adopting a [central-bank digital currency], offer protection against currency instability,” he said.
Ben Newsom added that cold storage could provide safe keeping for crypto — “essentially a golden brick on a flash drive” — but this advantage is countered by significant cybersecurity risks.
There’s also a huge legal barrier, he said. “The regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies remains undeveloped. If we can’t figure out a way to properly regulate cryptocurrency, [then] why would we risk holding it in a federal reserve?”
Read on: Crypto prices soar after Trump says strategic reserve will include bitcoin, XRP, Solana and others
