Czech National Bank Governor Ales Michl used the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas to make a direct case for holding bitcoin in central bank reserves, leaning on new internal analysis and extending a position that has already made the CNB a closely watched test case in sovereign crypto adoption.
Michl, in a keynote titled "Diversifying Central Bank Reserves With Bitcoin," said central banks need to think beyond traditional assets when building portfolios for the future.
"Central bank and Bitcoin — most people do not put these two things together. I do," he said.
The Czech National Bank has already moved further than its peers, and Michl’s speech expanded on this strategy.
The Block previously reported that Michl first floated bitcoin (BTC) as a reserve diversification tool in early January 2025.
He later proposed allocating as much as 5% of reserves to the asset, won board approval for deeper analysis, and then oversaw the CNB’s first digital asset purchase in November 2025 through a test portfolio that included bitcoin.
At Bitcoin 2026, Michl pushed that argument forward with data.
He said the CNB, which manages about $180 billion in reserves, had found that adding just 1% bitcoin to the portfolio would increase expected returns while keeping overall risk roughly unchanged because of bitcoin’s low correlation with other reserve assets.
"This is the future," Michl asserted on stage. He also acknowledged volatility, but argued that concentration risk exists in traditional assets too.
The speech arguably puts the Czech case in sharper focus.
Earlier this year, Standard Chartered opined that more sovereign wealth funds and, eventually, central banks could begin treating bitcoin the way institutions once treated gold — as a portfolio diversifier rather than a fringe asset. Michl is now giving that idea a central bank face.
Trezor CFO Stepan Uherik, speaking from the conference floor, seized on that shift. "The ECB has argued that bitcoin is not liquid, not secure, and not safe enough for reserves. Governor Michl just presented a study showing the opposite," he said.
Uherik added that the question is starting to move away from whether bitcoin is ready for reserves and toward whether other central banks can afford to ignore what the Czech central bank has found.
The Prague angle also adds another layer. Uherik noted that the Czech capital was home to both the first bitcoin mining pool and the first hardware wallet, arguing that the CNB’s stance reflects a city with a long-running bitcoin culture rather than a sudden policy whim.
Although Governor Michl is still talking about diversification for now rather than wholesale reinvention, the symbolism is hard to miss. The first central bank to buy bitcoin is now publicly making the portfolio case for holding more of it — and it did so from one of the biggest bitcoin stages in the world.
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