Aleš Michl, governor of the Czech National Bank, said the institution’s early research suggests a small Bitcoin allocation could improve portfolio returns without materially increasing overall risk. Speaking at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, Michl framed the finding not as a policy shift or ideological endorsement, but as part of a broader effort to rethink reserve management while maintaining strict monetary discipline.
Bitcoin Trial Puts Czech Central Bank In Uncharted Territory“Even before COVID, money was too cheap for too long,” Michl said. “For too long, the system promoted borrowing. For too long the currency, our currency, the Czech koruna, was weakened.”
That experience, he argued, defines his version of conservative central banking: tighter policy for longer, support for saving, and a stronger domestic currency. His rule, stated bluntly, was: “Stay hawkish forever.”
But Michl’s speech moved beyond interest-rate policy into the management of the Czech National Bank’s foreign exchange reserves. The bank oversees about $180 billion in reserves, equivalent to roughly 44% of Czech GDP, which Michl described as among the largest reserve positions in the world relative to the size of the economy. That scale, he said, forces the bank to think carefully about the long-term construction of its portfolio.
Over the past four years, the Czech National Bank increased the share of equities in its portfolio from 15% to 26%. It also raised gold exposure from almost zero to 6%. Michl said the aim was to build a portfolio with higher expected returns than before, lower risk than an all-stock allocation, and even lower risk than an all-bond portfolio.
The next question, he said, was whether the bank could go further. That led to Bitcoin. Michl recalled buying coffee with Bitcoin in Prague about a decade ago, joking that the purchase would now be worth roughly $350. “It was the most expensive coffee of my life,” he said.
Still, he did not minimize Bitcoin’s risk profile. Michl described the asset as highly volatile and said its price could rise substantially or fall to zero. But he argued that the same conceptual risk exists across other assets: stocks can collapse, and bonds can fail. For a reserve manager, the issue is not whether one asset is risky in isolation, but how it behaves inside a diversified portfolio.
The experiment will run for two years, after which the central bank plans to publish the results and decide what comes next.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $77,269.
