President Donald Trump said Friday he is committed to making the US a global leader in cryptocurrency, praised industry leaders for turning back what the previous administration said was an unfair attack on digital assets.
“We thought it was very important to stay in this previous section,” Trump said in the first-ever White House “Crypto Summit.”
A former crypto skeptic, Trump has warmly embraced the industry he showed great love for him in return and spent much to win last year’s election.
“It’s really great to see how things have changed and how the pendulum looked back,” Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder of Crypto Exchange Gemini, told Trump.
The summit includes executives from the crypto company, cabinet officials and lawmakers, many of whom have been replaced on Trump’s leadership over digital assets. Adult Industry said it was being treated unfairly by the Biden administration, and that it helped Trump and other Republicans win the last election.
Trump reiterated his enthusiasm to support the crypto industry with friendly laws and lite touch regulations.
Friday’s summit was the latest in a string of actions the new Trump administration took to boost the crypto industry. In particular, this includes the Securities and Exchange Commission, which will abolish several enforcement actions against large crypto companies, including those with leaders at Friday’s summit.
On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order establishing a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.” This essentially bans the US government from selling Bitcoin, which is currently valued at around $17 billion.
The order also allows the Treasury and Commerce to come up with “budget-neutral” plans for the government to acquire additional bitcoin, but details of what those plans will look like have not been released.
This order is a major boost to Bitcoin’s reliability and legitimacy. Bitcoin, the oldest and most popular cryptocurrency, has become an asset worth $1.7 trillion within 20 years, from an experiment by libertarian crypto enthusiasts.
“Bitcoin is special,” David Sachs, the Trump administration’s “crypto Czar,” told reporters on Friday.
Trump’s order also creates “digital asset reserves,” with the government holding seized cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin. On Sunday, Trump sent crypto prices in a short-lived surge after a surprising announcement that the government wanted the government to hold the lesser-known cryptocurrencies XRP, Solana and Cardano.
The story continues