How Much the Guests at Trump’s Crypto Summit Donated to His Inauguration #CriptoNews

The cryptocurrency investors and executives who crowded into the White House for a summit with Donald Trump on Friday represented billions in net worth.

They also represented more than $11 million in donations to Trump’s inaugural committee, a review of the guest list by The Intercept shows.

The list of invitees to the crypto summit offers a window into the tight links between Trump and the crypto world, which spent heavily last year to back candidates who favored looser regulation.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has dropped legal action against several leading crypto companies and on Friday hosted the White House meeting that drew alarm from ethics watchdogs.

Ahead of the White House summit, Trump signed an executive order creating a government bitcoin reserve — essentially telling the government to hold onto the bitcoin it has already acquired through forfeitures and directing it to find “budget-neutral strategies” for acquiring more. He also called on the government to maintain its holdings of more volatile “altcoins” other than bitcoin.

“From this day on,” Trump said at the summit, “America will follow the rule that every bitcoiner knows very well, never sell your bitcoin. That’s a little phrase that they have. Is it right? Who the hell knows.”

Watchdogs question Trump’s sudden embrace of crypto.

“The outsized influence the crypto industry seems to have on the Trump administration is concerning,” said Delaney Marsco, director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog group. “When you put it in the context of the campaign donations, the inaugural fund donations, it paints a really troubling picture of potential corruption.”

Running Down the List

The invite list for Friday’s summit, as confirmed by White House crypto and AI czar David Sacks, included companies that donated heavily to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Companies can give unlimited donations to that fund — making it an attractive way for them to curry favor. Large tech companies including Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft rushed to donate to the fund after Trump’s victory left them in political peril.

Among the companies invited to the summit, Crypto.com, Kraken, and Paradigm gave $1 million to the inauguration effort. They were outdone by the trading platform Robinhood, which gave $2 million, and by Ripple, which gave $5 million worth of its custom crypto token.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase also donated $1 million. During last year’s campaign, the company spread money around both parties, including a $1 million donation to a pro-Kamala Harris super PAC.

But the biggest item on Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s spending list was a pro-crypto super PAC, Fairshake, that disproportionately spent money on GOP candidates. Its spending may have helped tip the Senate for Republicans. Coinbase said in October that it would give another $25 million to the super PAC to help tip next year’s midterm elections as well.

In total, Trump received at least $10 million donated by crypto interests to his campaign or super PACs supporting him, according to the tracking website Follow the Crypto.

Some companies’ contributions to the fund may not have been made public yet, since the inaugural committee is not required to make a formal disclosure until 90 days after Trump’s swearing-in.

In January, Chainlink Labs co-founder Sergey Nazarov, another invitee to the summit, posted pictures of himself at inaugural balls that the Trump team used to entice big-ticket donors. The company did not immediately respond to a question about whether it had donated.

Many of the crypto executives invited to the gathering also made personal donations to Trump’s campaign or to pro-Trump super PACs.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin brothers who co-founded the Gemini crypto exchange, gave more than $800,000 each to a Trump campaign committee.

JP Richardson, the CEO of crypto wallet company Exodus, donated more than $850,000 worth of bitcoin to the campaign, according to a Fox Business report last year.

Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley gave $300,00 to a Trump campaign committee, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Kraken chair Jesse Powell, whose company was represented by another executive at the summit, said in June that he “personally donated” $1 million to Trump, complaining that “the Biden White House has stood by and allowed a campaign of unchecked regulation by enforcement.”

Multicoin Capital managing partner Kyle Samani gave $300,000 to a Trump campaign committee and hundreds of thousands more to the Republican National Committee.

David F. Bailey, the CEO of pro-crypto media company BTC, gave nearly $500,000 to a Trump campaign committee at the end of July.

Bailey, who took a leading role in the successful campaign to pardon Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, celebrated on social media after Trump’s victory: “The reality of what we just pulled off is really starting to hit. I know we took a big chance by going all in, but it was the right call and I’m very thankful to the community for making the leap of faith.”

Trump has a direct financial interest in another company represented at the summit: World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance company that lists Trump as its “chief crypto advocate.”

World Liberty Financial bought up $20 million of several cryptocurrencies ahead of the summit, leading to further criticisms from ethics watchdogs.

“President Trump has so many conflicts of interest broadly, it’s almost impossible to calculate how many conflicts of interest he has,” Campaign Legal Center’s Marsco said. “But it’s like this fox watching the henhouse situation, where you have a president who has a vested financial interest in crypto being a lucrative industry, and seeing itself become legitimized on a global scale.”

Inside the White House

Crypto leaders have influence outside and inside the White House.

One of Trump’s first acts after winning the election was to appoint venture capitalist David Sacks as his crypto and artificial intelligence czar. Sacks’s firm was invested in a crypto index fund manager, although the firm recently updated its website to say it had exited that investment.

Sacks also held undisclosed amounts of bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana but sold them before Trump’s inauguration, according to a social media post he made Sunday.

Sacks sat to Trump’s left during the crypto summit and blasted the Biden administration’s attempt to enforce securities rules. Since taking office, the Trump administration has dropped cases against Coinbase and Kraken, and put on hold a fraud case against a crypto investor who had bought $30 million of tokens from Trump’s company.

“This is an industry that was subjected to prosecution and persecution for the last four years. Horrible lawfare. And nobody knows what that feels like better than you do,” Sacks said. “You never back down, you stand to fight even in the face of an assassin’s bullet. It’s an inspiration to everyone in this room.”

Sacks earlier this week promised to make more details about his divestment from crypto holdings public later, a promise that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., challenged him to follow through on immediately in a letter Thursday. Warren noted that all five of the crypto tokens that Trump listed as possible holdings in a U.S. crypto reserve also had been held by one of Sacks’s companies.

“The planned Crypto Strategic Reserve is just the most recent example of a Trump Administration crypto policy with the potential to benefit a wealthy, well-connected few at the expense of taxpayers,” she said.

Sacks is a special government employee, the same status wielded by Elon Musk as he oversees the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Another White House official with ties to the crypto world, Bo Hines, oversees Trump’s crypto council. Before moving to D.C., Hines’s media company joined forces with a meme coin that launched amid accusations of a pump-and-dump scheme.

Hines sat to Sacks’s left during the summit Friday.