On Friday, President Donald Trump will host a cryptocurrency summit, illuminating the reversal of fortune the cryptocurrency has witnessed from the days it was hounded by the Biden administration. David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, will host the meeting.
“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, stated before the meeting.
On Thursday, Trump issued an executive order creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. He wrote, “Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin protocol permanently caps the total supply of bitcoin (BTC) at 21 million coins, and has never been hacked. … Because there is a fixed supply of BTC, there is a strategic advantage to being among the first nations to create a strategic bitcoin reserve. The United States Government currently holds a significant amount of BTC, but has not implemented a policy to maximize BTC’s strategic position as a unique store of value in the global financial system. Just as it is in our country’s interest to thoughtfully manage national ownership and control of any other resource, our Nation must harness, not limit, the power of digital assets for our prosperity.”
“The Reserve will be capitalized with Bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings,” David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, wrote on X. “This means it will not cost taxpayers a dime. It is estimated that the U.S. government owns about 200,000 bitcoin; however, there has never been a complete audit. The E.O. directs a full accounting of the federal government’s digital asset holdings. The U.S. will not sell any bitcoin deposited into the Reserve. It will be kept as a store of value. The Reserve is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency often called “digital gold.” Premature sales of bitcoin have already cost U.S. taxpayers over $17 billion in lost value. Now the federal government will have a strategy to maximize the value of its holdings.”
On January 23, Trump issued an executive order titled “Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology” to “support the responsible growth and use of digital assets. The order stated that the “digital asset industry plays a crucial role in innovation and economic development in the United States,” adding that federal agencies were prohibited from “undertaking any action to establish, issue, or promote CBDCs (central bank digital currencies)” anywhere in the world.
The order revoked President Biden’s March 2022 Executive Order 14067, titled “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets,” and also directed the Secretary of the Treasury to “immediately revoke” the Biden Administration’s “Framework for International Engagement on Digital Assets,” issued on July 7, 2022.
