The White House just hosted its first-ever crypto summit, bringing together Cabinet officials and top executives from a variety of digital asset firms.
Industry participants at the summit included Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, the Winklevoss twins, and Zach Witkoff, co-founder of President Donald Trump’s own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Combined, the participants have given more than $11m to Trump’s inaugural committee, according to the Intercept.
They were there with a mission – to discuss the Trump regime’s commitment to rolling back the aggressive regulatory stance the Biden administration took toward the crypto industry. And participants came away from the meeting believing that a new crypto era has dawned in Washington.
Shift in policy
“The government representatives expressed that there has been a negative regime towards the crypto industry, and that regime is now coming to an end,” said Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, who attended the summit. “There’s a significant shift and huge amounts of support.”
At the summit, Trump himself led a public press conference, and attended a private conference with the executives. In his public remarks, he mocked Biden for his anti-crypto stance and asked Congress to pass bills on stablecoins and a digital asset framework before the August recess. He also had FIFA president Gianni Infantino show off the soccer World Cup Trophy, and while doing so, Infantino floated the idea of creating a FIFA meme coin.
“That coin may be worth more than FIFA in the end,” Trump said in response.
Crypto prices plummet
interestingly, since investors seemed to be looking for even more of an articulated support plan – and didn’t get it from the summit event – the prices of the very assets the summit was supposed to tout actually sagged on Friday.
It didn’t help that when Trump’s “crypto czar,” venture capitalist David Sacks, announced that the president had signed an order to create a “strategic bitcoin reserve,” the order indicated the reserve would only comprise current bitcoin holdings previously seized by federal law enforcement agencies. A separate “digital asset stockpile” would also be created to hold non-bitcoin digital tokens, like ethereum and ripple, that have also been seized in enforcement proceedings.
And the executive order gave no explicit guarantee or timetable for the government to begin making new cryptocurrency purchases outright.
Bipartisan legislation
With that said, enthusiasm for such a stockpile and a far more lenient crypto regulatory environment is high. Last Wednesday, the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets held a hearing to discuss bipartisan cryptocurrency legislation. At the hearing, Chair of the Subcommittee Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said she intended to pass two major pieces of cryptocurrency legislation this year.
The Senate also voted to get rid of a Biden-era rule that required some crypto businesses to report information to the IRS. The expectation is that the first, which would focus on stablecoins – crypto tokens pegged to the dollar – should be an easier lift, but the senator’s broader goal is to address the digital asset market in its entirety.
After Trump was elected, he appointed several cabinet members with close ties to the industry, such as AI and crypto czar David Sacks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Many enforcement actions, including one against Coinbase, have been dropped. And the most pro-crypto commissioners of the SEC, Mark Uyeda and Hester Peirce, have acting chair and leader of the SEC’s Crypto Task Force as their respective new roles now.
