The summit brought together industry experts, pro-crypto lawmakers and administration officials, marking a notable moment for the digital assets space as it looks to reach mainstream acceptance.
“My administration is working to end the federal bureaucracy war on crypto, which was really going on pretty wildly during Biden,” Trump said during remarks at the summit Friday afternoon.
Crypto executives and advocates have argued the Biden administration shuttered its doors to the digital assets space and chose to instead pursue probes into various cryptocurrency exchanges and firms.
Since Trump was sworn into office, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has closed several of the investigations into cryptocurrency firms, many of which were represented at the summit, including Coinbase and Ripple among others.
David Sacks, the White House’s AI and crypto czar, called on cryptocurrency Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who said earlier in the day it was more likely they would end up in jail than the White House a year ago.
“We never thought that we’d get attacked the way we did in our backyard after trying to do the right thing for so many years and always trying to raise the bar with respect to regulation,” Cameron Winklevoss said during the roundtable.
“It’s truly wonderful to see how things have changed and how the pendulum has swung back in the way it has.”
It came on the heels of Trump's executive order creating a strategic bitcoin reserve and digital assets stockpile with assets already seized by federal law enforcement while disrupting financial crimes.
Trump slammed the Biden administration for selling some of the government's bitcoin holdings, and Sacks claimed they would now be worth $17 billion. It is not immediately clear when these holdings were sold.
“From this day on, America will follow the rule that every bitcoin knows very well, never sell your bitcoin,” Trump said. “That’s a little phrase that they have. Is it right? Who the hell knows.”
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com
