“”It’s a very important day in your life, “said President Donald Trump at the crypto, the White House on March 7. Trump chaired the very first Summit of Crypto, in which he and other officials of the cabinet gathered some of the biggest names in Crypto to re -register the support of the president for the industry and to hear the ideas of executives for regulations and legislation. Participants far removed from the autonomized meeting and believing that a new cryptographic era appeared in Washington.
“Government representatives have expressed that there was a negative regime towards cryptographic industry and that the regime is touching now,” said Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, who attended the summit. “There is an important change and huge amounts of support.”
“Very open and receptive”
In recent years, the cryptography industry has rubbed shoulders with the actions to apply the law put against them by the administration of President Joe Biden. The Securities and Exchange Commission of Biden (SEC), led by Gary Gensler, sought to repress the cryptographic societies which he deemed violated the laws on securities and protect investors against the scams and massive frauds which are omnipresent in the cryptographic world, like Terra-Luna and FTX. This led to prosecution against large and large companies, including Coinbase.
After Trump was elected, he appointed several members of the cabinet with close links with industry, such as the AI and the Crypto Tsar David Sacks, the trade secretary Howard Larnick and the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Many implementing measures, including the case against Coinbase, have since been abandoned. And the most pro-Crypto commissioners of the dry, the most evidence Hester Peirce, were high: she now directs the Dry crypto working group.
All these officials were present at the top, as well as Tom Emmer, the whip of the majority of the house. “I did not expect people who were so elderly at the top,” said Nazarov. “All those who came from industry were able to speak and provide their point of view. And all the tops of government, I think, were very open and receptive. »»
Trump himself headed a public press conference at the top as well as a private conference with the leaders. In his public remarks, he laughed at Biden for his anti-Crypto position, asked the Congress to pass the bills on stablescoins and a framework of digital assets before the recess of August and, for any reason, allowed the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino. “This part can be worth more than FIFA at the end,” said Trump in response. (Trump’s own piece of memes, Trump, initially raked millions of dollars in negotiation costs, although it has since fallen from its summit from $ 75 to $ 12).
Participants in the Industry at the Summit included Brian Armstrong de Coinbase, Michael Saylor from Microstrategy, the Twins Winklevoss, and Zach Witkoff, co-founder of the own Trump cryptography company, World Liberty Financial. Combined, the participants gave more than $ 11 million to the Trump inaugural Committee, According to interceptionAnd criticisms have raised many questions concerning conflicts of interest. “When crypto companies have spent Over a hundred million Dollars in the 2024 elections, they created a new game book for the purchase of a large-scale political power in America, ”wrote Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, in an email declaration in Time.
“The people who should be in front of him are in front of him, but there are also people who should not be before him who are before him,” explains Avik Roy, co-founder and president of the Think Tank Foundation for research on equal opportunities. “One of the challenges of public policy is always: how does someone in the post of president distinguish people who make lobbying and people who are public?”
After the summit, the office of the Trump of the Currency Controller (OCS) Orientation issued Allow banks to hold cryptocurrencies and ask them to make their own diligence around risk. This served as another signal that Trump’s administration will not regulate the industry very closely. “This industry has been a little unfairly abolished to reach its potential in the American system,” said Nazarov. “They want to go completely in the other direction.”
Find out more: Within the chess match which led the federals to 3.6 billion dollars of Bitcoin stolen
Trump cryptographic reserve
The summit came a day after Trump published a Executive decree announcing the creation of a federal Bitcoin reserve. When Trump launched the idea earlier in the week, many people expressed their concerns: Trump would disrupt taxes in order to buy crypto and created risks including much smaller and volatile parts like Cardano and XRP in the proposal.
But the decree fell greatly these plans. He announced that the United States would not buy any new bitcoin, but simply keep the cryptocurrencies they had seized in crisis. Andrew O’Neill, the director general of digital assets of S&P Global Ratings, described the order of “mainly symbolic” in a press release.
The initiates of the industry applauded the decision to focus mainly on a separate Bitcoin reserve, effectively downgrading the importance of other crypto projects – of which The founders put pressure on Trump to support. “It would have been a fairly clear result, where well -connected people were able to bring the government to buy their tokens without really an obvious strategic justification to do this,” explains Roy. “Bitcoin is a special case; He has no CEO.
The executive decree also provides for a complete audit of American crypto holdings, which should include around 200,000 bitcoin (is about $ 17 billion). Yesha Yadav, professor of law of Vanderbilt, specializing in the regulation of cryptography and securities, says that the audit will be important to determine the quantity of this usable bitcoin and how much could have returned to victims of fraud. A good part of this Bitcoin hiding place probably comes from the Bitfinex hack, which the American government seized in 2022. “Whether or not they are motivated to trace each victim in this case, whether the victims arose and whose statements have not been dealt with – which will have to be examined,” said Yadav.
The cryptography prices were turbulent in the last month, partly due to the uncertainty about Trump’s prices. But the initiates of the cryptographic industry think that in the end, the approach of Trump’s leave will help them develop. “The FTX is in the past now,” says Nazarov. “The big failures are in the past.”
Andrew R. Chow’s book on Crypto and Sam Bankman Frit, Cryptomawas Published in August.
