The concept of a U.S. Strategic Crypto Reserve has been floating around for a while now. While I’ve been critical of it for several reasons—the idea that a government “stockpile” of digital assets somehow fits into the original vision of Bitcoin is laughable—there’s something particularly concerning about the actual assets chosen to make up this so-called reserve.

A strategic reserve is supposed to consist of assets that are essential in times of crisis: oil, medical supplies, and maybe even rare-earth minerals. Something that a nation might need to rely on in an emergency—be it war, economic catastrophe, or a sudden breakdown of global supply chains.

Instead, the U.S. government has allegedly chosen three digital assets that range from functionally useless under real-world pressure to outright incapable of doing what they claim. Those three assets?

• Cardano (ADA) – A slow, clunky experiment in academia masquerading as a blockchain.
• XRP (Ripple) – A bank settlement layer that doesn’t scale and doesn’t settle.
• Solana (SOL) – A blockchain so fragile that a stiff breeze knocks it offline.

ADA: The blockchain that doesn’t fit its blocks

Let’s start with Cardano (ADA), the pet project of Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson: the king of grandiose promises who never quite delivers.

Cardano has spent years boasting about how it would revolutionize blockchain with peer-reviewed research and a slow, methodical approach to development. And while the papers are pretty, the reality is its blockchain struggles to fit more than a handful of transactions per block.

• Block size: Cardano operates with a relatively small block size of 88KB (recently increased from 72KB in 2022). Compare that to BSV’s 4GB blocks, and the contrast is stark.
• TPS limitations: Despite claiming scalability, Cardano averages a laughable 1 TPS under normal conditions, with a theoretical max of 250 TPS—but only if every single transaction is optimized to perfection (which, in reality, never happens).
• Smart contract failures: After years of hype, smart contracts were finally introduced via Alonzo in 2021—only for people to discover they couldn’t handle more than one transaction per block due to UTXO model constraints.

Cardano’s solution? Increase block times, increase block sizes, and just keep making slow tweaks while pretending the network is ready for the scale it claims. In reality, Cardano is so horrendously inefficient that it can’t even sustain a single mid-sized Web3 game, let alone serve as a financial backbone for a nation-state.

XRP: Banking infrastructure without banks

If there’s a crypto asset that has perfected the art of sounding impressive while failing at basic functionality, it’s XRP. Ripple Labs has spent over a decade promising that XRP would replace SWIFT, claiming that banks and financial institutions would inevitably shift to its lightning-fast settlement system.

The problem? Banks never showed up.

• TPS Reality Check: Ripple claims XRP can handle 1,500 TPS, but actual stress testing shows that the network begins to fail at around 100 TPS—far from what’s needed to replace real banking infrastructure or even a big day of memecoin trading…
• No Native Smart Contracts: Despite existing for over a decade, XRP doesn’t support smart contracts, meaning it cannot host DeFi, tokenization, or complex financial instruments natively. Third-party workarounds (like Hooks) add more centralization and risk.
• Centralized Validators: XRP’s validation is built on the UNL (Unique Node List), which effectively means Ripple decides which nodes matter and which don’t. Unlike Bitcoin, where miners compete to secure the network, XRP is effectively a permissioned database controlled by a few trusted entities.

Solana’s entire pitch is speed—60,000 transactions per second! The problem?

• Most of those transactions are just internal consensus messages, meaning the real throughput for actual users is closer to 300-500 TPS on a good day.
• Solana has gone completely offline at least 11 times.
• It has been centrally restarted multiple times.

Imagine holding a “strategic reserve” of an asset that can be turned off when overwhelmed. It’s like storing your nation’s emergency fuel supply in a gas station with frequent blackouts.

On top of that:

• Validator centralization is extreme. Over 50% of Solana’s stake is held by less than 20 validators, meaning a cartel of insiders could severely influence network decisions.
• The network is riddled with bot spam. In some cases, over 90% of transactions are just bots engaging in internal arbitrage games, inflating the numbers while doing nothing useful.
• To say one nice thing, Solana’s UX/UI tooling and implementation are world-class, and everyone could learn from what they’re doing on that front.

A “Strategic Reserve” that serves no strategic purpose

Let’s summarize the major problems with this supposed crypto reserve:

1. All three assets are centralized – Ripple controls XRP validators, Solana’s network is frequently rebooted by insiders, and Cardano is primarily governed by a corporate entity. How is this different from holding corporate stock?
2. All three assets fail under pressure – Whether it’s Cardano’s microscopic block capacity, XRP’s inability to handle real-world banking volumes, or Solana crashing under its own weight, these coins can’t scale.
3. None of them are used in the real economy – Unlike Bitcoin, which has an actual history of usage in commerce, remittances, and infrastructure, these three networks exist primarily for speculation.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin was invented to eliminate the need for custodians, reserves, and centralized financial intermediaries altogether.

The idea of holding a “strategic reserve” of crypto misses the entire point of what Satoshi Nakamoto created. A blockchain that actually scales—like BSV—doesn’t need to sit in some government vault. It must be used to circulate through a real economy where transactions pay for the network.

Instead of clunky, unscalable, centralized tokens pretending to be strategic assets, maybe it’s time to actually start building on the one blockchain that was designed to work at scale from the start.

But I don’t think that’s what any of this is about. I think it’s about appeasing donors and lining pockets, which is tragic.

Watch: Bitcoin Retrospective and a Focus on the Future of the Internet with Mike Hearn

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