Aleš Michl, governor of the Czech National Bank, used a speech at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas to present Bitcoin not as a monetary policy shift, but as a limited reserve-management experiment. In remarks delivered on the event’s second day, Michl said the central bank has opened a separate Bitcoin test portfolio and plans to evaluate it over two years before deciding whether any broader action is warranted. His framing was explicit: the move is meant to test diversification within a large reserve pool, not to signal a departure from conservative central banking.
Czech Governor Frames Bitcoin as Reserve Test
Michl said the Czech National Bank approaches reserve management from a position of monetary conservatism, pointing to the inflation shock that greeted him when he took office in 2022. “When I became governor of the Czech National Bank in mid 2022, inflation in my country was close to 20%. 20%. It was a serious moment,” he said. “When I took office, I said we would bring inflation back to 2% within two years. And we did it. Thank you. Not with magic, with discipline.”
He used that backdrop to argue that conservative monetary policy does not preclude innovation in portfolio construction. According to Michl, the Czech National Bank manages roughly $180 billion in foreign exchange reserves, equivalent to about 44% of Czech GDP, making the reserve book unusually large relative to the size of the domestic economy. He said the bank has already adjusted its reserve mix in recent years, increasing equities to 26% from 15% over four years and lifting gold to 6% from nearly zero.
Against that reserve-management context, Michl introduced Bitcoin as a portfolio question rather than an ideological one. “So in the Czech National Bank we started a separate test portfolio with Bitcoin. A test portfolio. Not a revolution. Not a political statement. a test,” he said. He also acknowledged the asset’s risk profile in unusually direct terms for a central banker, telling the audience that Bitcoin’s volatility is much higher than that of other assets and that “one day its price may be much higher or it could go to zero.”
Two-Year Trial Targets Portfolio Diversification
The core of Michl’s case rested on an internal working paper he referenced during the speech. He said the bank modeled a portfolio with a 1% Bitcoin allocation and found that expected returns increased while overall risk in Czech koruna terms remained “about the same.” According to Michl, that result came from Bitcoin’s relatively low long-term correlation with many traditional assets, allowing it to improve the portfolio mix despite its standalone volatility.
He described the rationale in portfolio-theory terms rather than as a directional bet on Bitcoin itself. “Because Bitcoin has low longterm correlation with many traditional assets, it does not move in the same way and that matters,” Michl said. “So when you add an asset like this, the whole portfolio can work better. return can go up and risk stay about the same. That is diversification.” He added that, in his view, Bitcoin can resemble venture capital in its return profile, while being “much more liquid.”
Michl said the bank will run the Bitcoin test portfolio for two years and then publish the results before making any next-step decision. “We will run it for two years. Then we will publish the results. Then we will decide what comes next,” he said. Based on the speech transcript, he did not provide operational details on custody, benchmark design, rebalancing, or the size of the pilot portfolio beyond the 1% model reference, leaving several practical questions unanswered for now.
Michl’s remarks place the Czech National Bank among a small group of institutions willing to publicly discuss Bitcoin in reserve-management terms, while still emphasizing caution and process. His message to the Bitcoin 2026 audience was that a central bank can remain “hawkish forever” on inflation and still examine whether a small Bitcoin allocation improves a diversified reserve portfolio. For now, according to his speech, the initiative remains exactly what he called it: a two-year test.
AI Transparency Note: This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI system based on the sources listed and was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication. All quotes, data points, and factual claims are intended to be grounded in the cited source material; however, errors cannot be ruled out entirely.
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