A pair of 50-page policy proposals laying out the plan in detail. Discussions about the specifics with President-elect Donald Trump and his advisers. And talks with Cabinet nominees about how to pay for it.

On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the cryptocurrency industry is pushing his incoming administration to execute an audacious plan that would have seemed unimaginable just a year ago: a government program to buy and hold billions of dollars in bitcoin.

As he campaigned last summer, Trump vowed to create a federal “bitcoin stockpile” that would serve as a “permanent national asset to benefit all Americans.” Bitcoin enthusiasts hailed the idea as potentially transformative, claiming that it would help reduce the national debt. Trump could still abandon the plan, and its details are under debate. But industry executives have spent weeks lobbying to shape the proposal, raising hopes that Trump might act soon after taking office.

In recent days, crypto executives have offered input to David Sacks, a venture capitalist whom Trump appointed to oversee crypto and artificial intelligence, on a possible executive order that covers several areas of crypto policy, three people with knowledge of the matter said. The bitcoin stockpile is part of those discussions, two of them said.

“This could be the Day One initiative,” said Pete Rizzo, an editor at Bitcoin Magazine, an industry news publication. “It’s certainly an idea that has come a long way in a short amount of time.”

By some estimates, the United States owns as much as $19 billion in bitcoin that it has seized from criminals over time, a stash that the government has recently moved to sell. Some crypto executives are calling on Trump to simply hold on to that bitcoin, which he could most likely do with an executive order. Others are pushing a more ambitious plan in which the government would acquire tens of billions of dollars in new bitcoin, building a “strategic reserve” similar to federal stockpiles of gold and oil. That amount of spending may require congressional approval.

The profits from a bitcoin stockpile would help chip away at the $36 trillion national debt, proponents of the plan have argued, and ensure U.S. economic dominance if the global economy someday runs on cryptocurrencies.

But the most obvious beneficiaries would be people who already own bitcoin, which surged to a record price of $100,000 last month. Any indication that the government plans to buy it is likely to send prices even higher. In September, Trump rolled out his own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.

Privately, some crypto executives say they are concerned the plan could make the industry seem greedy, and many financial experts have dismissed it as a self-serving stunt, noting that bitcoin’s price has swung wildly over the years.

“There’s nothing strategic or sensible about this idea,” said Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell. “This would certainly be great for current bitcoin holders and equally certainly be a bad deal for taxpayers.”

But the mere fact that a bitcoin stockpile is under consideration is a sign of how drastically the political winds have shifted after a yearslong regulatory crackdown on the crypto industry.

Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of the crypto company Ripple, said in an interview that he had recently had dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida and that he had encouraged the president-elect and his advisers to establish a federal stockpile containing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, including XRP, a coin closely tied to Ripple’s business.

“He cares about really living up to his desired legacy of being the crypto president,” Garlinghouse said.

The two 50-page proposals for the new policy, published by a bitcoin advocacy group, have circulated among industry executives and Trump’s allies. And in recent weeks, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., an outspoken crypto booster, has discussed with Trump’s transition team, including Cabinet nominees, a plan to buy 1 million bitcoin over five years, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

Asked to comment for this article, Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team, said the president-elect “will deliver on his promise to encourage American leadership in crypto and other emerging technologies.”

For years, bitcoin enthusiasts have speculated about a U.S. government stockpile — a reserve of digital gold to go along with the nation’s holdings of actual gold. Federal authorities have accumulated some 200,000 bitcoin in criminal seizures, including billions of dollars’ worth of the cryptocurrency from hackers who looted the Silk Road, an online drug marketplace.

But the notion that the United States could hold on to that bitcoin forever or acquire more on the open market did not gain traction until Trump embraced crypto on the campaign trail, after dismissing it as a “scam” in 2021.

In July, shortly before he was scheduled to speak at a popular bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump met privately with a group of crypto executives and floated the idea of a bitcoin stockpile, said Nathan McCauley, who attended the gathering and runs Anchorage Digital, which offers storage options for digital currencies. Onstage at the conference, Lummis unveiled a bill, the BITCOIN Act, calling for the United States to buy 1 million bitcoin over five years.

In his speech, Trump stopped short of explicitly calling for the government to buy more bitcoin. But he promised to turn the nation’s existing holdings into the “core” of a “national bitcoin stockpile” and praised the cryptocurrency as a “marvel of technology.” He appeared to double down on the promise in an interview last month at the New York Stock Exchange when asked whether he would create a crypto stockpile. “Yeah, I think so,” he replied.