Balaji Srinivasan stated at the Asia Bitcoin Conference that Bitcoin's transparency means it will become a reserve currency for Western institutions that need to prove solvency in the post-fiat era.

He has long argued that Bitcoin possesses the trading attributes of a global reserve asset: it can be bought and sold at known prices in any country or device without going through specific intermediaries. Previously, he mentioned that if Bitcoin prevails, the Federal Reserve would lose control, issuance could not be arbitrarily increased, and stablecoins would openly compete with various national digital currencies.

The 2026 conference will be held in Hong Kong, covering topics such as corporate treasuries, adoption in Asia, and network states. Srinivasan is the author of "The Network State" and a former technology executive at Coinbase. Western institutions still primarily hold government bonds and gold, while Bitcoin spot exchange-traded funds and corporate treasuries are new channels in recent years.

The scale of U.S. government debt has exceeded $40 trillion, and discussions about the freezing of single sovereign bonds have increased among reserve managers, leading to more alternative assets like gold being included in diversification strategies. He highlighted the on-chain auditable supply, which needs to be proven externally against the balance sheets of institutions.

In market mechanics, buyers are institutions and countries that need to write reserves into publicly verifiable accounts, while sellers rely on the issuer's creditworthiness of fiat currency reserves. The event is driven by conference speeches, with funds expected to shift from narrative trading into treasury allocations; benefiting are Bitcoin spot products that have opened institutional channels, while traditional reserve models that still classify Bitcoin solely as a risk asset are under pressure.

Source: Public Information