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President Trump embraced cryptocurrency during his campaign, including during this visit to a cryptocurrency-themed bar called Pubkey in New York City on Sept. 18.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The White House is hosting a summit on cryptocurrency on Friday, a first-of-its-kind event that is expected to highlight the significant shift in posture that the Trump administration is taking on crypto compared with its predecessors.
Trump, who has a financial stake in a crypto business called World Liberty Financial that he and his family launched in September 2024 and his own meme coin, promised on the campaign trail to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.”
The White House has not released any details about the format of the summit and who is attending, but the event will be hosted by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, as well as Bo Hines, who advises the White House on digital assets.
Sacks said on social media on Thursday evening that Trump had made good on a promise to create a cryptocurrency strategic reserve, signing an executive order to do so. It will be seeded with an estimated 200,000 bitcoins seized through court proceedings, and Trump authorized officials to look for “budget-neutral” ways to buy additional bitcoin for what Sacks described as a “digital Fort Knox.”
The government will also stockpile other types of digital assets seized in court actions, he said, but won’t seek to buy more of them.
Trump: “My attitude is different”
Trump has been critical of the Biden administration’s enforcement push through the Securities and Exchange Commission in trying to crack down on cryptocurrency.
“You have a very hostile SEC. … They’ve been very hostile toward crypto, toward all of it, and extremely hostile like nobody can believe,” Trump said in September. “My attitude is different. If we don’t do it, China’s going to do it. China’s doing it anyway.”
In recent weeks, his administration has rolled back investigations and lawsuits against crypto businesses, and Trump has announced he wants to create a government cryptocurrency strategic reserve. The Senate also voted to get rid of a Biden-era rule that required some crypto businesses to report information to the IRS.
The summit is one of the first steps in figuring out how to create a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency, says Campbell Harvey, a professor of finance at Duke University.
“Over the past four years, at least, the regulatory complex has been very combative, almost in a warlike situation, against the innovators in the space,” Harvey said. “So it’s time to step back and to look at the possible benefits of this new technology and weigh them against the costs.”
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