Georgia SB 228: State Depositories Bitcoin Investment Bill

SB 228 would have revised O.C.G.A. Section 50-17-63, which governs state depository and investment powers, by adding bitcoin to a statutory list of assets the State Depository Board may permit the state treasurer to invest in. The text used discretionary language: the board “may permit” investment in bitcoin. That structure matters because the bill did not appear to mandate an immediate state purchase, establish an automatic bitcoin reserve, or set a fixed allocation of state funds.

• Bitcoin investment authority: The bill would have added bitcoin as a permitted asset category, subject to State Depository Board authorization.
• Treasury policy development: The state treasurer, in consultation with the board, would have been required to develop policies and procedures for bitcoin acceptance, storage, and transactions.
• Custody and security standards: The bill referenced secure custodial technologies, cold storage, and digital asset management best practices for state-owned bitcoin.
• Qualified custodians: The policies could involve qualified, United States-based entities approved by the board to serve as custodians of bitcoin owned by the state.

SB 228 would have added a new O.C.G.A. Section 50-17-68. The proposed section defined bitcoin as a decentralized digital asset created by a peer-to-peer network that operates without a central authority or banks. It also defined cold storage as a method of storing private keys required to transact in bitcoin, tied to a secure physical location protected from unauthorized access and isolated from network connections.

The custody provisions were significant because the bill covered all bitcoin “received or otherwise owned” by the state, not only bitcoin acquired as an investment under the amended depository statute. In practical terms, that language would have made the state’s bitcoin handling policies relevant to investment activity as well as any other channel through which the state might come to own bitcoin.

For crypto-law tracking, SB 228 sits at the intersection of government crypto holdings, custody, banking access, and payments policy. It reflected a state-level approach that would have used existing treasury governance structures rather than creating a standalone reserve authority. The bill’s importance is therefore procedural as much as substantive: it showed one model for placing bitcoin within a state investment statute while pairing that authority with custody-policy requirements.