Trump hosts crypto leaders after creating strategic reserve of bitcoin | Cryptocurrencies #CriptoNews

Cryptocurrency industry elite met with Donald Trump at the White House on Friday to discuss how the government will enact Trump’s vision of making the country the “crypto capital of the world”. During the round-table summit, which had more than a dozen attendees, the president thanked each of his guests.

“High-IQ individuals around this table, high-IQ,” Trump said. “We feel like pioneers.”

Trump hosted players including crypto entrepreneurs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss; Michael Saylor, co-founder and the executive chair of MicroStrategy; and Zach Witkoff, one of the founders of the president’s own crypto business, World Liberty Financial.Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood Markets, also attended.

Trump signed an executive order on Thursday creating a strategic reserve of cryptocurrency for the United States. During the summit, he said this reserve will be like a “digital Fort Knox for digital gold to be stored”.

David Sacks, a tech investor whom Trump has named his “crypto czar”, thanked the president for his leadership in the digital asset industry and remarked: “Your administration is moving at tech speed.

“This was an industry that was subjected to persecution,” Sacks said. “And no one understands that better than you do.”

After the initial introductions, the attenders began their off-camera summit. The event is expected to focus on Trump’s plans to build the strategic reserve, which the president said will contain bitcoin and four other coins. Trump directed the secretaries of treasury and commerce to develop “budget-neutral strategies” for acquiring additional bitcoin that have no “incremental costs” on taxpayers.

“For the first time, industry leaders feel they’re walking into a collaborative discussion,” said Les Borsai, co-founder of Wave Digital Assets, a crypto investment adviser, who said he had not received an invitation.

Participants said they were focused on any further details on the strategic reserve, a government stockpile of crypto assets. The reserve will be capitalized with bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, Sacks earlier said in a post on social media platform X.

“This [strategic reserve] is going to be the biggest point of contention for many of us,” said JP Richardson, co-founder and CEO of Exodus, a bitcoin wallet developer. Although he owns the four other coins that Trump has suggested including in the reserve, he does not think they have a place in a strategic reserve.

“Crypto has made big strides, but it’s still a relatively nascent industry,” Richardson said. The other coins are smaller and function in a very different way, one he said may create more risk. Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, posted on X on Sunday that a bitcoin-only reserve was “probably … the best option”. Both Richardson and Armstrong attended the summit.

In a post on X, Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, who also attended the summit, hailed Trump’s recognition that “we live in a multichain world” stretching beyond bitcoin. XRP, the coin tied to Ripple, is one of the four other cryptocurrencies Trump has suggested may be added to a crypto reserve. Attendees said they were optimistic about working with an administration that views crypto as a mainstream asset class and expressed hope for a straightforward regulatory process.

“What everyone really needs to have at this point is clarity on what the level of scrutiny and intensity of regulation will be, who the key regulators will be,” said Yesha Yadav, the associate dean and a professor of law at Vanderbilt University. That could speed up the process of approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission of a flurry of new listings of exchange-traded funds.

Trump’s family has launched cryptocurrency meme coins and he also holds a stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto platform, which has sparked some conflict-of-interest concerns. His aides have said Trump has handed over control of his business ventures, which are being reviewed by outside ethics lawyers. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.