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As about two dozen crypto-industry executives head to the White House for a summit on Friday, President Donald Trump has a gift ready for them: An executive order calling for the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a separate stockpile of other digital assets.
Trump signed the order Thursday night, according to posts on X by his artificial-intelligence and crypto czar David Sacks and aide Margo Martin. Both the reserve and the stockpile will contain crypto forfeited as part of legal proceedings, according to Sacks.
The order authorises the Treasury and Commerce departments to develop “budget-neutral strategies” for buying more Bitcoin for the reserve with no incremental costs to taxpayers, Sacks wrote. The government will not acquire additional crypto for the stockpile of other assets beyond those obtained through forfeiture proceedings, Sacks added.
The executive order comes on the eve of a Friday White House gathering to celebrate Trump and to plot a course forward under the president who is friendly to the industry following a crackdown by President Joe Biden’s administration in the wake of the collapse of the FTX exchange.
Coinbase Global Inc. CEO Brian Armstrong, Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor of the company known until recently as MicroStrategy Inc., and Vlad Tenev of Robinhood Markets Inc. will be among those scheduled to assemble at 1:30 p.m. eastern time for the White House Digital Assets Summit. Trump issued the offer to join him at the White House, according to an invitation seen by Bloomberg News.
To industry advocates, the event represents a dramatic change in the political climate surrounding the asset class after the crackdown that followed the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.
“It represents a turning point for the industry,” said JP Richardson, CEO of Omaha, Nebraska-based digital-wallet provider Exodus Movement Inc., who is attending the summit. “If you go back to 2022, you had the Biden administration being actively hostile to our industry. Now being at the White House, talking with the president about crypto policy, that means this administration is taking crypto seriously.”
The gathering comes just days after Trump’s announcement on his Truth Social platform that the US would include three lesser-known digital tokens in his proposed crypto reserve. The post sparked an intense but short-lived crypto rally.
Critics of the Sunday post on Trump’s Truth Social platform questioned the project’s merits and the tokens he highlighted: SOL, XRP and ADA. The summit will feature Sacks, a venture capitalist and now White House adviser on crypto and AI, alongside Bo Hines, director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets.
Trump, a crypto skeptic during his first administration, warmed up to the industry while on the campaign trail.
He was initially persuaded to go along with a pitch to offer NFTs and then met with exchanges and the Bitcoin mining companies that handle the blockchain transactions.
Those conversations opened up a spigot of donations from the industry.
Coinbase, the largest US exchange, and digital-asset firm Ripple made significant contributions in the last congressional election cycle, and also donated to Trump’s inauguration celebrations.
Trump pitched the idea of a national strategic Bitcoin stockpile at an industry conference in Nashville last July. At that same event in Nashville, Trump pledged to fire former US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler on his first day in office, a statement widely cheered by industry insiders.
Gensler resigned in January.
In January, shortly after being sworn in for his second term as president, Trump signed an executive order on cryptocurrencies. That order called for studying the feasibility of creating a digital asset stockpile but fell short of declaring that Bitcoin would be the focal point of a national reserve.
“I think this crypto summit demonstrates President Trump making good on the promises he made in Nashville,” said Christopher Giancarlo, who served as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the first Trump administration. He now serves on the board of the crypto company Paxos Trust Co.
Since Trump took office, the SEC has dismissed or paused lawsuits and investigations involving at least 10 crypto companies, including Coinbase, Robinhood, Uniswap Labs and OpenSea. — Bloomberg.
Online Reporter