What the Act actually says
On 6 May 2025 Governor Kelly Ayotte signed House Bill 302, and New Hampshire became the first state to let its treasury hold bitcoin.
The text is narrower than the headline it produced. It amends RSA 6:8 so that the state treasurer may invest in precious metals and in digital assets with a market capitalisation above 500 billion dollars averaged over the previous calendar year, drawing on the general fund, the revenue stabilisation fund and any other fund the legislature names. No more than 5 percent of total public funds may go into those investments. Whatever is bought has to be held directly by the treasurer through a secure custody solution, by a qualified custodian, or as an exchange traded product.
May, not shall. The Act creates a permission. It does not create a reserve, does not appropriate a dollar, and does not oblige the treasurer to buy anything.
What happened next
As of August 2026, nothing has been bought. No allocation has been announced, and the treasurer, Monica Mezzapelle, told legislators she would not use the new authority for operating money or for the state's rainy day fund, leaving only a small, more aggressive pool as a candidate, with no decision taken. A year after signature, commentators tracking the law were still describing an allocation announcement as the thing to watch for rather than as something that had occurred.
The one bitcoin transaction New Hampshire came close to was not a purchase at all. The state's Business Finance Authority proposed a 100 million dollar conduit revenue bond for a private borrower connected to the miner CleanSpark, collateralised by roughly 160 million dollars of bitcoin held with a custodian, rated Ba2 by Moody's, with no state guarantee. In July 2026 the Executive Council rejected it three votes to two. The state's furthest step toward bitcoin was a deal it did not have to fund, and it still did not take it.
The domino that did not fall
The original version of this post argued that New Hampshire had opened a monetary arms race, and that Texas, Florida and Wyoming would follow. One third of that was right.
Florida's two reserve bills were indefinitely postponed and then died in committee in June 2025. Wyoming's did not clear the process. Arizona's legislature passed a reserve act and Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed it on the ground that the state retirement system was not the place for an untested investment. Texas did pass a law, and Texas is the only state that has actually put public money into bitcoin.
So the count after a full legislative cycle is one state buying, a handful authorising, and most of the rest declining. That is not a cascade. It is a normal distribution of appetite, which is what you would expect when the thing being proposed is a discretionary allocation of public money into a volatile asset, and when the officials who carry the downside are treasurers rather than legislators.
The strongest case for the other side
A permission that sits unused is not worthless, and the argument that it is deserves an answer.
Authorisation changes the default. Before HB 302 a New Hampshire treasurer who wanted exposure had to ask whether it was lawful. Now the legal question is settled and only the prudential one is left, which is a different and much smaller conversation. The Act also supplied a template that other states copied more or less verbatim, including the 500 billion dollar market capitalisation test, a threshold written so that exactly one asset passes it without naming that asset in statute. And an option has value even unexercised: a treasurer who wants to act in a crisis does not have to wait for a legislative session.
That case is real. It is also a much smaller claim than the one that was made at the time, including here.
What to actually watch
The useful sequence has three steps, and only the first has happened in most places. A legislature authorises. A legislature or a treasurer allocates. Somebody decides how the coins are held.
The third step is where the substance is, and it is the one nobody announces. New Hampshire's own text offers three custody routes and treats them as interchangeable, but they are not: an exchange traded product is a claim on a fund that holds the coins, a qualified custodian is a claim on a company, and only the first route, keys held by the state, is a holding rather than a promise. Texas chose an exchange traded fund. The federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve says "custodial accounts" and stops there.
A state that authorises without allocating has changed nothing yet. A state that allocates without deciding custody has bought an exposure, not a reserve. New Hampshire is still on the first of those, fifteen months in, and the honest reading of that is not that the game has begun. It is that passing the law was the cheap part.
Correction, 20 August 2026. This post originally stated that New Hampshire had enacted a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act" that would allocate up to 5 percent of public funds to bitcoin, and predicted that Texas, Florida and Wyoming would follow. HB 302 authorises but does not require any allocation, no allocation has been made, and of the three states named only Texas enacted a reserve law. The post also carried attributed quotations and a characterisation of analysis by Fidelity and by Edward Snowden that we could not verify against any source; those have been removed. The argument has been rewritten around what the Act does and what has happened since.