Arizona Legislature cleared native-form custody rules for unclaimed crypto

Arizona’s Senate passed H.B. 2749 on April 30, 2025, completing legislative approval of a bill that would bring cryptocurrency into the state’s unclaimed-property system and establish a Bitcoin and Digital Assets Reserve Fund.

The Senate approved the measure by 20 votes to 8, with two members not voting. Arizona’s House had passed it on February 26 by 57 votes to none, with three members not voting. The April 30 action was consequential because it moved digital assets beyond general policy recognition and into the operational machinery of state custody, owner inactivity, qualified custodians, staking rewards and asset disposition.

H.B. 2749 was not law at the close of April 30. Legislative records show that transmission to the governor occurred on May 1. The vote therefore established legislative approval, not an enacted reserve, completed transfer or state cryptocurrency purchase.

How the unclaimed-property process would work

The engrossed bill defined digital assets broadly to include virtual currencies, cryptocurrencies and other digital-only assets conferring economic, proprietary or access rights or powers.

Under the proposed framework, a digital asset would be presumed abandoned three years after a written or electronic communication was returned to its owner as undeliverable. That presumption would cease if the owner exercised an ownership interest or communicated with the holder in a way documented by the holder or its agent. Qualifying activity included accessing the account, conducting a transaction or taking another action reasonably demonstrating awareness of the property.

A holder reporting an abandoned digital asset would have to deliver it in its native form to the Arizona Department of Revenue or its designated qualified custodian within 30 days. The bill defined a qualified custodian as an eligible company, bank, trust company or special-purpose depository institution licensed to sell digital assets and provide custody services in Arizona.

Native-form delivery mattered. It meant the legislation contemplated transferring the digital asset itself rather than requiring the holder to liquidate it into dollars before delivery. If a holder possessed only part of a private key or otherwise could not move the asset, the holder would retain it until the additional required keys became available.

What the reserve fund actually covered

Despite its name, the proposed fund was not an authorization to spend general state revenue buying bitcoin. The fund would consist of airdrops, staking rewards or interest earned through the unclaimed-property process. The state treasurer would administer it, and its contents would remain subject to legislative appropriation.

With legislative approval, the treasurer would deposit 10% of the digital assets held in the fund into Arizona’s general fund. The text expressly prohibited the Legislature from depositing bitcoin into the general fund.

The Department of Revenue could direct a qualified custodian to stake eligible assets or receive airdrops. Listed abandoned assets would generally be sold at prevailing exchange prices, while assets without an established market could be sold through a commercially reasonable method. Those provisions created operational questions about custody, valuation, liquidity, key control and which assets could safely participate in staking.

Why the April 30 vote mattered

The measure treated cryptocurrency as property requiring asset-specific administration rather than as interchangeable cash. That distinction was important for owners because forced conversion can separate a claim from the subsequent performance of the original asset. It was also important for the state because native-form custody introduces technical and counterparty risks that ordinary unclaimed cash does not present.

No verified market-price, trading-volume, fund-flow or on-chain measurement establishes a reaction to the April 30 vote. The defensible event-date conclusion is narrower: Arizona lawmakers approved a legal framework for handling unclaimed digital assets, but no reserve balance, purchase, staking transaction or realized return had been established.

Later context

Governor Katie Hobbs signed H.B. 2749 on May 7, 2025, when it became Chapter 150. That later action confirms the bill’s eventual legal status but does not change what was knowable on April 30, when executive approval remained pending.