A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
New York
CNN
—
The crypto industry is buzzing ahead of Friday’s White House summit on digital assets.
That’s a sentence that would have been laughable just a couple of years ago. Crypto kingpins rubbing elbows with the president and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission? Hogwash!
Regardless of what you think about their products, there’s no denying that the onetime financial pariahs have come a long way. No White House in the past 15 years, including Trump 1.0, treated crypto as a legitimate industry, let alone one worthy of a fancy summit.
But $130-million-plus in political action committee spending later, here we are.
Friday’s meeting will bring together a tight-knit circle of crypto elite, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and billionaire tech entrepreneur/bitcoin hype man Michael Saylor, among others. From the White House, count on seeing the venture capitalist and Trump crypto czar David Sacks, digital assets task force leader Bo Hines and acting chairman of the SEC Mark Uyeda.
The meeting is, in part, a victory lap for an industry that feels as if it’s been brought in from the financial wilderness. And it’s an opportunity for executives to pay homage to the man who’s clearing their path.
“I think the most important thing that’s going to happen tomorrow is all of us are going to express our gratitude to the president for… laying out a really positive and ambitious agenda for the US to be a crypto leader in the world,” Faryar Shirzad, chief policy officer at Coinbase, told me. “All the companies around the table are already ramping up their investments to build in America. And I think it’ll be an opportunity to thank him for giving us the room to do that, and take the US back into a leadership position.”
Aside from the genuflection to President Donald Trump, the agenda is likely to be a grab-bag of industry priorities — the various pieces of legislation making their way through Congress, guidance on a regulatory framework, removing the capital gains tax on crypto, etc.
But by far the biggest focus will be on a proposed “strategic reserve,” Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of crypto news platform Blockworks, told me.
The reserve is another suddenly-on-the-table concept that would have been a punchline under any previous administration. Put simply, a strategic reserve would see the US government stockpile digital assets (the way it does with gold and petroleum), in theory to hedge against financial risks.
Trump pitched a bitcoin reserve on the campaign trail, helping him curry favor among crypto fans.
But details of his plan caused a stir earlier this week after Trump fired off a social media post saying the reserve would include not just the relatively well-established bitcoin and ether but also three much smaller, much more volatile tokens. The announcement caused a spike in crypto prices that quickly fizzled as investors were left wondering about the specifics.
“The biggest hope for this summit is clarity on a US strategic reserve that includes bitcoin,” Scott Melker, an investor and the host of “The Wolf of All Streets” podcast, told me in an email.
That hope has been fueled by reports of bullish activity from a Trump-linked crypto wallet two days ahead of the event: The project, World Liberty Financial, appeared to buy more than $20 million worth of ether and a bitcoin derivative called WBTC.
Still, a lot of people, including some crypto advocates, don’t love the idea of a reserve.
It’s not clear how such a project would be funded. It would be politically risky, to say the least, to use taxpayer money to buy crypto at a time when the federal government is laying off tens of thousands of employees and slashing critical services.
Apart from more details on the reserve, industry bigwigs (who’ve long complained that the Biden administration was strangling crypto) are looking forward to some basic regulatory guidance.
“Our focus is very much on getting legislation done,” Shirzad said. “Once you have that, then you’ve got building blocks and the regulatory framework that allows all of us in the industry to invest, build and essentially update the financial system.”
While crypto’s elite take a moment to soak up all the optimism, it’s worth remembering this is an asset class that’s synonymous with volatility. Crypto markets were hardly immune to the global trade chaos and fears of economic headwinds that whipsawed financial markets around the globe this week.
Bitcoin has been moving largely in tandem with stocks, swinging wildly as investors try to wrap their heads around Trump’s ever-shifting messages on tariffs. The bellwether asset was bouncing around the $90,000 level Thursday — well off its $109,000 high, reached on Inauguration Day just six weeks ago.
“The market is hanging on every word from Trump and watching these meetings like a hawk,” Melker noted. “If we get vague statements and no clear direction, expect disappointment and volatility. We’ve seen this before — big expectations, little substance.”
