Trump Says He’s Ending the U.S. Government’s ‘War on Crypto’

The Washington Post

12:39 JST, March 8, 2025

President Donald Trump promised to roll back regulations on cryptocurrency Friday, hosting CEOs and investors at a White House event that signaled a dramatic change in the fortunes of an industry with a reputation for scandals that has been treated with suspicion by financial regulators.

Flanked by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the White House’s crypto and artificial intelligence czar, David Sacks, Trump also discussed an executive order he signed Thursday to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, calling it “a virtual Fort Knox for digital gold to be housed within the United States Treasury.”

The reserve and an additional U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile, created by the same order and consisting of other cryptocurrencies, will be composed of digital assets the government already holds due to criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, Trump said.

The order and the White House crypto summit followed a series of executive actions by Trump intended to aid the industry, which the president and many crypto insiders claim was treated unfairly by President Joe Biden.

“My administration also is working to end the federal Bureaucracy’s war on crypto, which was really going on pretty wildly during Biden,” Trump said Friday.

During his reelection campaign, Trump promised to make the United States “the crypto capital of the world.” He even has a digital coin of his own: $TRUMP, unveiled shortly before his inauguration.

“It’s really extraordinary and gratifying to go from being in exile to being in the room where it happens,” Faryar Shirzad, chief policy officer for Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange, said in an interview Thursday ahead of the White House event.

Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission has paused or dismissed litigation or investigations targeting seven cryptocurrency companies that began under the Biden administration, according to Public Citizen, including Coinbase, Kraken and Robinhood, whose CEOs attended Friday’s summit.

Sacks, the host of Friday’s event, told reporters outside the White House on Friday that the government will audit the digital assets it currently holds before establishing the new reserves.

The bitcoin reserve is intended to be held for the long term, Sacks said. For the stockpile of other tokens, the Treasury and Commerce secretaries will have the discretion to decide on sales or purchases, he said, as long as they’re “budget-neutral.” The government will not initially acquire additional crypto assets, Sacks said.

Trump said earlier this week that the crypto reserve would include bitcoin, ethereum and the less well-known digital tokens solana, cardano and XRP. Several U.S. states, including Arizona, Illinois and Texas, have also shown interest in creating state crypto reserves.

Trump’s recent pro-crypto actions have also included signing an executive order in his first week in office to ease regulation on the crypto industry. He issued another order that week pardoning Ross Ulbricht, the founder of illicit online marketplace Silk Road, which operated using cryptocurrency, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for conspiracy and money laundering.

The president has promoted the $TRUMP crypto token to his millions of followers on X. World Liberty Financial, a digital firm affiliated with the Trump Organization, controls 80 percent of the supply and appears to collect a fee on sales.

The connection has fueled concerns about the president commingling personal business with his official duties. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The crypto industry has also won a degree of bipartisan support in Congress.

The Senate recently passed a resolution – with a wide bipartisan margin – that recalled a Biden administration crypto tax rule an industry think tank branded “technically unfeasible.” The chamber also is considering a bipartisan bill to establish a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar that are used for remittances.

“We have champions and skeptics on both sides,” Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, said in an interview Thursday.

The cryptocurrency industry spent nearly $88 million on lobbying Congress between 2012 and 2024, according to an analysis by OpenSecrets, a money-in-politics watchdog group. The vast majority of that spending – $71.4 million – occurred between 2022 and 2024.

Despite the visibility of cryptocurrency at the White House, the majority of Americans do not hold cryptocurrencies. A 2024 survey from the Pew Research Center found that 17 percent of American adults have invested in, traded or used a cryptocurrency, a proportion that hasn’t changed since 2021.

In 2022, cryptocurrency prices and the industry’s reputation plunged in unison when the crypto exchange FTX collapsed after CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and his associates perpetrated one of the largest financial crimes in U.S. history.

Bankman-Fried last year was sentenced to 25 years in prison for misappropriating billions in customer funds. In an interview with right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson released Thursday, Bankman-Fried said he was “hopeful” for the future of crypto under Trump. Bankman-Fried also discussed sharing a cellblock with Sean “Diddy” Combs.

The CEOs at the White House event also included Shayne Coplan of Polymarket, an online platform where users can bet on future events using cryptocurrency, according to a post he made on X Thursday.

The Trump administration’s “commitment to collaboration with American innovators is revitalizing the American dream,” Coplan wrote in an X post Thursday.

Billions of dollars was wagered on the presidential election on Polymarket, but it is closed to U.S. investors. The company paid a $1.4 million penalty in 2022 to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.