“This is a very important day in your lives,” President Donald Trump told crypto executives at the White House on March 7. Trump was presiding over the first ever Crypto Summit, in which he and other cabinet officials gathered some of the biggest names in crypto to reemphasize the President’s support for the industry and to hear out the executives’ ideas for regulation and legislation. Participants largely came away from the meeting empowered—and believing that a new crypto era has dawned in Washington.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
“The government representatives expressed that there has been a negative regime towards the crypto industry, and that regime is now coming to an end,” says Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, who attended the summit. “There’s a significant shift and huge amounts of support.”
“Very open and receptive”
For the last few years, the crypto industry chafed at the enforcement actions brought against them by President Joe Biden’s Administration. Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), led by Gary Gensler, sought to crack down on crypto companies he deemed were violating securities laws, and protect investors from the massive scams and frauds that are pervasive in the crypto world, like Terra-Luna and FTX. This resulted in lawsuits against companies big and small, including Coinbase.
After Trump was elected, he appointed several cabinet members with close ties to the industry, such as AI & crypto czar David Sacks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Many enforcement actions, including the case against Coinbase, have since been dropped. And the most pro-crypto commissioners of the SEC, most prominently Hester Peirce, were elevated: She now leads the SEC’s Crypto Task Force.
All of those officials were present at the Summit, as well as Tom Emmer, the House Majority Whip. “I did not expect people that were so senior to be at the summit,” Nazarov says. “Everyone that came from the industry side was able to speak and provide their views. And all the senior government people, I think, were very open and receptive.”
Trump himself led both a public press conference of the summit as well as a private conference with the executives. In his public remarks, he mocked Biden for his anti-crypto stance, asked Congress to pass bills on stablecoins and a digital asset framework before the August recess, and, for some reason, allowed FIFA president Gianni Infantino to show off the soccer World Cup Trophy and pitch the idea of creating a FIFA meme coin. “That coin may be worth more than FIFA in the end,” Trump said in response. (Trump’s own meme coin TRUMP initially raked in millions of dollars in trading fees alone, although it has since fallen all the way from its $75 peak to $12.)
Industry participants at the summit included Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, the Winklevoss twins, and Zach Witkoff, co-founder of Trump’s own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Combined, the participants have given more than $11 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, according to the Intercept, and critics have raised many questions around conflict of interest. “When crypto companies spent over a hundred million dollars in the 2024 elections, they created a new playbook for the purchase of large-scale political power in America,” Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, wrote in an email statement to TIME.
“The people that should be in front of him are in front of him, but there are also people who shouldn’t be in front of him who are in front of him,” says Avik Roy, co-founder and chairman of the think tank Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. “One of the challenges in public policy always is: How does someone in the President’s position distinguish between the people who are merely lobbying and the people who are public-spirited?”
After the summit, Trump’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued guidance allowing banks to hold cryptocurrency, and asking them to do their own diligence around risk. This served as yet another signal that Trump’s Administration will not regulate the industry very closely. “This industry was kind of unfairly suppressed from reaching its potential in the U.S. system,” Nazarov says. “They want to go completely the other way.”
Read More: Inside the Chess Match That Led the Feds to $3.6 Billion in Stolen Bitcoin
Trump’s crypto reserve
The summit came a day after Trump issued an Executive Order announcing the creation of a federal Bitcoin reserve. When Trump floated the idea earlier in the week, many people expressed concerns: that Trump would levy taxes in order to buy crypto, and that he was creating risks by including much smaller and volatile coins like Cardano and XRP in the proposal.
But the Executive Order pulled back those plans quite a bit. It announced that the U.S. would not buy any new Bitcoin, but simply hold onto the cryptocurrencies that they had seized in seizures. Andrew O’Neill, the digital assets managing director of S&P Global Ratings, called the order “mainly symbolic” in a statement to TIME.
Industry insiders cheered the decision to mainly focus on a separate Bitcoin reserve, effectively demoting the importance of the other crypto projects—whose founders have been lobbying Trump for support. “It would have been a pretty clearly a cronyist outcome where well-connected people were able to get the government to buy their tokens without really any obvious strategic rationale for doing so,” Roy says. “Bitcoin is a special case; it has no CEO.”
The Executive Order also calls for a full audit of the U.S.’ crypto holdings, which is estimated to include around 200,000 Bitcoin (worth about $17 billion). Yesha Yadav, a law professor at Vanderbilt who specializes in crypto and securities regulation, says that the audit will be important to determine how much of that Bitcoin is usable, and how much might need to be returned to fraud victims. A good portion of that Bitcoin stash likely comes from the Bitfinex hack, which the U.S. government seized in 2022. “Whether or not they’re motivated to trace every single victim in that case, whether victims have come forward, and whose claims have not been dealt with—that is something that’s going to have to be looked at,” Yadav says.
Crypto prices have been turbulent over the last month, in part due to uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs. But crypto industry insiders believe that ultimately, Trump’s laissez-faire approach will help them grow. “FTX is in the past now,” says Nazarov. “The big failures are in the past.”
Andrew R. Chow’s book about crypto and Sam Bankman-Fried, Cryptomania, was published in August.
