Sitting beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, more than two dozen of the most powerful figures in the U.S. cryptocurrency industry, together worth many billions of dollars, gathered in the White House on Friday for an audience with President Trump.
When Mr. Trump entered the ornate State Dining Room after a short wait, the executives rose to applaud him.
“Many of you have been fighting for years for this,” Mr. Trump said as the room quieted. “It’s an honor to be with you at the White House.”
Mr. Trump was holding a first-of-its-kind “crypto summit,” meeting face to face with the leaders of virtually all of the top crypto companies in the United States. Only a small portion of the gathering, which was scheduled to last four hours, was broadcast to the public. But it offered a vivid illustration of Mr. Trump’s recent embrace of crypto, a renegade industry that has spent years battling with U.S. regulators.
Several executives, including Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the founders of the Gemini crypto exchange, offered words of gratitude to Mr. Trump. They called him “wonderful,” saying they were “overjoyed” with his approach.
“High I.Q. individuals around this table,” Mr. Trump responded.
Since he took office, Mr. Trump has orchestrated a complete transformation of federal policy on crypto. The Securities and Exchange Commission has almost entirely reversed an aggressive campaign by the Biden administration to crack down on the industry. The agency, moving with astonishing speed, has issued legal guidance to help crypto companies, ended investigations into major firms and dropped lawsuits against two of the largest exchanges, Coinbase and Kraken.
Leaders of both those companies were invited to the White House on Thursday. Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase chief executive, sat two seats away from the president.
“It signals the industry is finally a serious industry,” said JP Richardson, who runs the crypto firm Exodus and was invited to Mr. Trump’s summit. “We believe the technology can fundamentally change the world. And to actually have this administration take it seriously is really important.”
The meeting was also a reminder of Mr. Trump’s personal investment in crypto, which ethics experts have described as an alarming conflict of interest. The guest list included Zach Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, a close friend of the president who serves as the administration’s special envoy to the Middle East. The younger Mr. Witkoff is a founder of World Liberty Financial, a crypto business that Mr. Trump heavily promoted last year — and from which he and his family profit directly.
Once a crypto skeptic, Mr. Trump embraced digital currencies on the campaign trail last year, as crypto firms spent tens of millions of dollars to back him as well as congressional candidates who supported the technology.
Soon, Mr. Trump entered the market himself. Last fall, he and his sons worked with the Witkoffs to start World Liberty Financial, promoting it as a platform for borrowing and lending in crypto. World Liberty has its own digital currency, WLFI, and the Trump family receives a cut of the sales.
Just days before his inauguration, Mr. Trump also started selling a so-called memecoin, a type of cryptocurrency tied to an internet joke or a celebrity mascot. The coin, called $Trump, briefly surged and then crashed, costing investors a cumulative $2 billion.
Since winning the election, Mr. Trump has taken steps to boost the industry’s prospects, appointing crypto supporters to top administration posts and calling for federal agencies to develop a new approach to regulation.
On Thursday night, he signed an executive order to create a national reserve of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The plan was pitched by crypto executives as a strategy to chip away at the national debt.
Skeptics have attacked the proposal as a scheme to enrich a small number of crypto investors. Even some of Mr. Trump’s supporters in the technology world have joined in the criticism.
After Mr. Trump teased the reserve announcement on social media last weekend, Joe Lonsdale, a prominent tech investor, wrote on X that the government shouldn’t waste money on “crypto bro schemes.”
None of that dissent was on display at the summit. Sitting next to David Sacks, the White House’s crypto policy czar, Mr. Trump hailed the event as a turning point in the nation’s treatment of the crypto industry.
“I promised to make America the Bitcoin superpower of the world and the crypto capital of the planet,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re taking historic action to deliver on that promise.”
He said the new national Bitcoin stockpile would create a virtual Fort Knox for the nation’s holdings. “Never sell your Bitcoin,” Mr. Trump said.
In his own remarks, Mr. Sacks praised Mr. Trump’s leadership, saying the administration was “moving at tech speed.” The industry had been subject to “prosecution and persecution” under the Biden administration, he said.
“Nobody knows what that feels like better than you do,” Mr. Sacks said to the president.
Then he gestured to the Winklevoss twins, sitting on the other side of the room.
“You said something earlier that I thought was really profound,” Mr. Sacks told them. “A year ago, you thought that it would be more likely that you’d end up in jail than at the White House.”
