Cryptocurrency investors spent the week waiting for the high-profile “summit” between President Donald Trump and the top suits in decentralized finance. The meeting was supposed to provide some clarity on how the administration would make America more crypto-friendly — rather than just another proclamation from the new president that everything in token world would be made great again in his second term.
Instead, Trump began yesterday’s meeting, formally known as the White House Digital Assets Summit, by bringing out a soccer trophy.
Earlier in the day, Trump had hosted the soccer association’s president, Gianni Infantino, to create a task force to organize the 2026 World Cup hosted around the unhappy throuple of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. So he must have felt inspired to bring the soccer guy to the crypto guy conference. Infantino then pitched the crypto billionaires in the room on a coin for FIFA to “conquer the 5 billion soccer fans in the world.” The crowd, with crypto CEOs ranging from Michael Saylor to the Winklevii, did not seem interested in the investment opportunity.
“It could be quite a coin actually,” Trump said, in one of his few ad-libs of the afternoon. The president is clearly not comfortable riffing on the importance of cryptocurrency beyond just providing value to some of the richest donors to his inaugural fund. Instead, he preferred to stick to the script, telling the multi-millionaire and billionaire men around him that they’ve been “working very hard and very successfully” and describing how his bitcoin strategic reserve announced last night would become a “virtual Fort Knox for digital gold.”
The rest of the summit was devoted to thanking Trump for his interest in cryptocurrency and for putting the Securities and Exchange Commission’s many crypto investigations on pause.
“Can’t be more proud of you,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
“As a crypto founder, I couldn’t be more proud to be part of your administration,” said Small Business Administration administrator Kelly Loeffler. “You’re moving at the speed of tech for sure,” she added.
“God bless you for doing this,” said House majority whip Tom Emmer.
“We’re here because of your love of innovators,” said White House crypto adviser David Sacks, who added that the crypto industry was the victim of “lawfare” under Biden, just as Trump was. Sacks then kicked a question to one of the Winklevoss twins (Sacks forgot which one) who told him that a year ago he thought he’d “be more likely to end up in jail than in the White House.”
“We never thought we’d get attacked the way we did,” said Cameron Winklevoss. He was referring to he and his brother’s crypto exchange Gemini, which was charged by the SEC for the sale of unregistered securities under Biden. Now freer to operate with far less regulatory oversight, the Winklevii seemed happy to be there and happy with the summit: “The U.S. won the internet and the U.S. should win crypto.”
With all this gladhanding, one would expect that the price of major cryptocurrencies would be way up. But bitcoin is down about 4% over the last day. (This is mostly because Trump’s announcement of a bitcoin strategic reserve did not include an order for the government to buy any new coins, only to hold onto the crypto assets that the feds have already seized). While attendees left happy, in terms of actual movement it was another bust in Trump’s strange week toying with crypto. After about 20 minutes, reporters were kicked out of the room and the investors at hand began the work on Trump’s next symbolic announcement that will surely be the one to change cryptocurrency forever.
