Texas Representative Ron Reynolds filed House Bill 815 on Monday, giving every city and county in the state statutory permission to invest up to $10 million of public funds in bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. The bill carries no provisions for how those assets would be stored, secured, or audited.
HB 815 landed on the first day of prefiling for the 90th Texas Legislature. Its caption reads “Relating to the authority of a municipality or county to invest money in cryptocurrencies.” That’s it. The introduced text provides a cap, $10 million per jurisdiction, but stops short of mandating cold storage, multisig custodians, or reporting standards. A Missouri City Democrat, Reynolds is handing local treasurers the keys without a map.
No Custody Framework, No Guardrails
The absence of custody language is the story. Municipal bonds, money-market funds, and certificates of deposit come with decades of regulatory scaffolding. Bitcoin does not. A county comptroller could park $10 million on a hardware wallet in a desk drawer, or wire it to an exchange that gets hacked six months later, and HB 815 as drafted would be silent. That’s either a feature or an oversight, depending on whether you think elected officials should be forced to figure out operational security on their own.
Texas has flirted with bitcoin-friendly policy before, mining-friendly grid incentives, a strategic reserve discussion that went nowhere, but this is the first bill to green-light direct municipal investment at scale. If it passes, hundreds of jurisdictions gain the option. Some won’t touch it. Others will, and the first hack or volatility scare will test whether the legislature meant to build a permission structure or a liability magnet.
Timing and Context
The bill arrives as bitcoin hovers near multi-year highs and a handful of U.S. states consider strategic reserve legislation. Pennsylvania and Ohio have floated similar ideas at the state level; Texas is aiming lower, at cities and counties. That’s a wider surface area. It’s also a starker test case: state treasurers have staff and outside advisors; many county offices do not.
Reynolds didn’t outline a rationale in the bill text. No preamble about inflation hedging, no nod to diversification theory. Just a cap and a green light. Whether HB 815 becomes a model or a cautionary tale depends on what happens in the months after a city clerk signs the first wire.
