Sitting under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, over two dozen of the most powerful US encryption figures, worth many billions of dollars, raised at the White House on Friday for audiences with President Trump.
When Mr Trump entered the odd dining room after a brief waiting, the executives increased to welcome him.
“Many of you have been struggling for years for this,” Mr Trump said as the room relaxes. “It’s an honor to be with you at the White House.”
Mr Trump was holding a first meeting “Crypto Summit”, a face -to -face meeting with leaders of almost all the leading encryption companies in the United States. Only a small part of the concentration, which was scheduled to last four hours, was broadcast to the public. But he offered a vibrant depiction of the recent embrace of Mr Trump of Crypto, a Renegade industry that has spent years of battle with US regulators.
Several executives, such as Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the founders of the Gemini encryption exchange, offered words of gratitude to Mr Trump. They called him “wonderful”, saying he was “very happy” with his approach.
“High people IQ around this table,” Mr Trump replied.
Since taking up duties, Mr Trump has orchestrated a complete transformation of federal policy into Crypto. The Securities and Exchange Commission has almost reversed an aggressive campaign by the Biden administration to destroy the industry. The organization, which is proceeding at stunning speed, has issued legal guidance to help encryption, ended large -scale investigations and threw lawsuits against two of the biggest exchanges, Coinbase and Kraken.
The leaders of both companies attended the White House event on Friday. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, was sitting two seats away from the president.
“It marks that the industry is ultimately a serious industry,” said JP Richardson, who manages Crypto Exodus and flew to Washington to attend Mr Trump’s summit. “We believe that technology can fundamentally change the world. And in order to really have this administration to take it seriously it is really important.”
The meeting was also a reminder of Mr Trump’s personal investment in Crypto, which ethics experts described as alarming conflict of interest. The list of visitors included Zach Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, a close friend of the president serving as a Middle East special envoy. The youngest Mr Witkoff is the founder of the World Liberty Financial, a encryption operation promoted by Mr Trump last year – and from which he and his family immediately win.
As soon as a skeptic encryption, Mr Trump embraced digital coins on the campaign trail last year, as encryption companies spent tens of millions of dollars to support him, as well as Congress candidates who supported the technology.
Soon, Mr Trump entered the market. Last fall, he and his sons worked with the Witkoffs to launch the World Liberty Financial, promoting it as a lending and loan platform to Crypto. World Liberty has its own digital currency, the WLFI and the Trump family receive a cut in sales.
A few days before his inauguration, Mr Trump also started selling a so -called memecoin, a kind of encryption associated with an internet joke or a celebrity mascot. The currency, called $ Trump, briefly increased and then crashed, costing investors a cumulative $ 2 billion.
As soon as he won the election, Mr Trump has taken steps to boost industry prospects, appointing encryption supporters to top management positions and asking federal services to develop a new approach to regulation.
On Thursday night he signed an executive order to create a national reserve of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Crypto executives threw the plan as a strategy to move away from national debt.
Skeptics attacked the proposal as a plan to enrich a small number of encryption investors. Even some of Mr Trump’s supporters in the technological world have been included in criticism.
After Mr Trump drives out the social media announcement last weekend, Joe Lonsdale, a prominent technological investor, wrote in X that the government should not lose money for “cryptographic systems”.
None of these disagreements appeared at the Summit. The meeting was cordial, said Sergey Nazarov, founder of Crypto Company Chainlink, who attended the event. One by one, executives shared their views on encryption policy, with little time for discussion or disagreement.
“It was not a meeting where things were decided or revealed,” Mr Nazarov said. “This was more than one type of brainstorming meeting.”
In the public section of the Summit, Mr Trump sat between David Sacks, the political encryption of the White House of Czar and Scott Bessent, the secretary of the Ministry of Finance. Mr Trump welcomed the event as a turning point in the treatment of the nation for the encryption industry.
“I promised to make America the superpower of the world and the encryption of the world’s capital,” he said. “We take historical action to achieve this promise.”
He said that the new National Bitcoin reserve would create a virtual fort knox for the nation’s participation. “Never sell your bitcoin,” Mr Trump said.
In his own observations, Mr Sacks praised Mr Trump’s leadership, saying that the administration “moves at technology speed”. The industry had been “prosecuted and prosecuted” under Biden’s administration, he said.
“No one knows what it feels better than you,” Mr Sacks told the president.
He then returned to the Winklevoss twins, sitting on the other side of the room.
“You said something earlier that I thought it was really deep,” Mr Sacks told them. “A year ago, you thought you would be more likely to end up in prison than in the White House.”
