Crypto leaders meet at Trump’s summit with strategic reserve in focus
US President Donald Trump wooed the cryptocurrency industry’s elite at the White House on Friday, hosting a first-of-its-kind summit focused on his plans for a government-owned stockpile of digital assets.
Trump welcomed a wide range of industry players including Zach Witkoff, one of the founders of the president’s own crypto business, World Liberty Financial, his social media posts showed.
In addition to top administration officials and lawmakers, guests in the White House’s State Dining Room included MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and entrepreneur David Bailey.
A major focus of the event was Trump’s goal to build a strategic reserve containing bitcoin, which he formalized in an executive order on Thursday that also said there would be a stockpile of other digital assets.
‘Budget-neutral’
That order directed the secretaries of Treasury and Commerce to develop “budget-neutral strategies” for acquiring additional bitcoin that have no “incremental costs” on taxpayers.
“We don’t want any cost to the taxpayers,” Trump said at the summit.
The reserve will be capitalized with bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, White House crypto czar David Sacks said in a post on social media platform X.
Sacks told reporters at the White House that establishing a bitcoin reserve should have been done a long time ago. He said taxpayer funds would not be used to acquire digital assets and that there were existing protections in place to safeguard consumers from crypto investments.
The plans disappointed some in the market who had hoped for a firm plan to buy new tokens. The announcement weighed on the price of bitcoin, last down 3.4 percent at $86,394.
“This (strategic reserve) is going to be the biggest point of contention for many of us,” said JP Richardson, co-founder and CEO of Exodus, a bitcoin wallet developer. Although he owns the four coins other than bitcoin that Trump has suggested including in the reserve, he does not think they have a place in a strategic reserve.
