North Carolina Senate Gets Based: Bill Proposes State Treasury to HODL 10% in Bitcoin

The Tar Heel State's Senate just dropped a legislative surprise that's more exciting than finding a forgotten seed phrase. Senate Bill 327, dubbed the North Carolina Bitcoin Reserve and Investment Act, has cleared its first reading and is now shuffling over to the Rules and Operations Committee for its next round of scrutiny.

Should this bill become the law of the land, the State Treasurer would get the ultimate degen mandate: to allocate up to 10% of public funds into Bitcoin as a long-term strategic hedge. The plan involves locking those precious sats away in cold-storage wallets, secured by multi-signature authentication, with a shiny new custodial department inside the Treasurer's office holding the keys.

Overseeing this potential state-sponsored HODL would be a Bitcoin Economic Advisory Board, a council of industry experts tasked with crafting strategy, conducting monthly audits, and verifying everything from balance to security. All purchases would happen on regulated U.S. exchanges, with the timing of bulk buys left to market conditions—because even a state treasury might try to buy the dip. The bill even gently suggests the Treasurer look into state-run mining to literally print its own money.

This proposed Bitcoin reserve is being framed as a fiscal break-glass-in-case-of-emergency tool. It could only be deployed for severe budget crises, pre-approved investment plays, critical infrastructure, economic development, or funding crypto-related research and education. Crucially, selling any of the stack would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the General Assembly, making liquidation harder than explaining memecoins to a senate hearing.

Further sweetening the deal, the legislation allows the reserve to back bonds, giving North Carolina a novel, crypto-collateralized financing option for public projects. For transparency, the Treasurer would be required to file quarterly reports on the reserve's status and performance, which would then be posted publicly—finally, some government paperwork worth reading.

The text explicitly mandates compliance with all federal and state crypto regulations, including tax rules, and encourages advocacy for more favorable Bitcoin policies at the federal level. They're trying to play by the rules, even if the rulebook is still being written on a napkin.

North Carolina is just the latest state to catch the orange-pill bug. Texas, New Hampshire, and Arizona already have skin in the game with their own Bitcoin reserves, while a sprawling list of others—from Maryland to Florida—have either floated or stalled similar proposals. This growing trend signals that state treasuries are increasingly viewing Bitcoin not as a meme, but as a legitimate store-of-value hedge and portfolio diversifier. The race to become the most based state treasury is officially on.