The rate of U.S. debt accumulation warrants separate consideration. It took 192 years to accumulate the first trillion dollars of debt—this milestone was reached in 1981. Each subsequent trillion accumulated faster: for instance, going from $5 trillion to $10 trillion by 2008 took five years, and then—just five years to climb from $20 trillion in 2017 to $30 trillion in 2022.
The latest surge—from $39 trillion to the recently surpassed mark of $39.95 trillion—took only five months, marking the fastest trillion-dollar increase in history.
What Fuels the Debt Growth and Interest Payment Expenses
In July alone, the federal budget deficit was $432 billion, bringing the deficit for the first ten months of the fiscal year to approximately $1.8 trillion—a figure that already exceeds the entire deficit recorded in the 2025 fiscal year. Maya MacGuineas from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget directly pointed to this pace, noting that the government is currently increasing debt by "$14 billion per day," and stating that to stabilize the trend, the deficit must decrease to a level close to 3% of GDP.
An increasing share of this problem is occupied by interest payment expenses. Net interest payments on the debt for the fiscal year have already exceeded $1 trillion—this sum currently exceeds Washington's spending on national defense or the Medicare program. The total federal debt has risen to 124% of GDP, with just the debt held by external investors accounting for approximately 101% of GDP, approaching the record level of 106.1% of GDP recorded in 1946 after World War II.
Bitcoin.com News covered this previous debt-to-GDP ratio milestone in July when this indicator first surpassed the comparable threshold.
Arguments for Bitcoin as a Hedge Against Debt Grow Louder
The movement toward the $40 trillion mark has directly bolstered the crypto industry's favorite argument that Bitcoin serves as a hedge against a currency backed by a government that cannot stop borrowing. This argument was detailed in an analytical piece when the debt first exceeded $39 trillion in July, and has since been supported by an increasing number of institutional sector representatives.
Senator Cynthia Lummis has also been vocal on the matter, and her BITCOIN Act bill (which would require the Treasury Department to acquire up to 1 million BTC within five years and hold the coins for at least two decades) asserts that this could reduce the national debt by a third or even by half. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong separately put forward the idea of using Bitcoin as a "hard currency-backed" mechanism to control federal spending, positioning debt as a constitutional issue as much as a fiscal one.
Finally, the International Monetary Fund warned that by 2029, global public debt could reach approximately 100% of world GDP if current trends persist, with the U.S. and China named as two primary contributing factors. The IMF's own analysis shows that such a scenario could play into Bitcoin's favor, i.e., unlike a bond sell-off driven by a quest for yield, a debt solvency crisis could redirect capital into alternative assets rather than simply withdrawing it from markets (this dynamic favored Bitcoin during the Cyprus banking crisis in 2013 and again during the U.S. regional banking crisis in 2023).
Not everyone agrees that this trading strategy works as advertised, given that both Bitcoin and gold have fallen in price for a significant part of 2026, even as the debt set one record after another—a reminder that the debasement theory operates on a longer timeframe than price behavior over a single month.
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