The White House Crypto Summit, an event aiming to shape cryptocurrency policy in America, will occur this Friday, March 7. It will give the president and his crypto advisory group direct contact with key people in the crypto community. The summit is in line with Trump’s executive order which aims to “support the responsible growth and use of digital assets, blockchain technology, and related technologies across all sectors of the economy”. Trump aims to make America the crypto capital of the world, further embracing his crypto project, including many of his family members such as Eric Trump, who attended Bitcoin Mena 2024 in Abu Dhabi. The summit will be an opportunity for Trump to promote his own approach to innovation. He will remind the audience that the previous administration stifled crypto projects, introducing regulation that not only limited the crypto industry but further limited American innovation on the world stage. Trump has described the Biden administration as waging a war on crypto. In the first months of the new presidency, Trump established a working group for digital currencies, providing a platform for proposing regulatory frameworks. One of the main things that people in the crypto industry wanted from Trump was regulatory clarity so that the rules were clear and easy to abide by. Trump gave David Sacks, a cryptocurrency advocate, the job as leader of the new working group. “They just want to know what the rules of the road are”, said David Sacks, “so they can abide by them. We’re coming off frankly four years of arbitrary prosecution and persecution of crypto companies where the SEC wouldn’t tell founders what the rules were and then they would prosecute them”. Sacks recounts how many industry leaders were “debunked personally just because they had founded a crypto company.” He is looking forward to the crypto summit so that he can work with politicians and entrepreneurs to ” create a golden age for digital assets.” Needless to say, regulation will be a key focus of the crypto summit. Sacks will focus on forward-thinking regulation for stable coins and other digital assets. The White House Crypto Summit is rumoured to replace the previously named Crypto Advisory Council. The focus is expected to be more on cross-agency regulation, with added input from the private sector. The Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, the addition of Bitcoin to America’s gold reserves, may also feature prominently in the summit, having received extensive media coverage leading up to it. The summit will be succeeded by many new summits in the future, each focused on a separate piece of regulation and bringing in the appropriate crypto leaders when they have expertise on that regulation. The White House summit comes just days after Circle co-founder Jeremy Allaire stated that customers would be required to register with U.S. authorities. Circle is the company behind the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. Allaire argued that stable coin providers should abide by the law and provide necessary consumer protections so that they do not ignore U.S. law and do whatever they want with crypto. “Whether you are an offshore company”, said Allaire, “or based in Hong Kong, if you want to offer your US dollar stablecoin in the US, you should need to register in the US just like we have to go register everywhere else.” The upcoming summit, focusing on regulation, may clarify how legislation will affect stable coins. David Sacks, head of the new group for working with digital currencies, has stated that stable coins could be used to spread the dominance of the U.S. dollar worldwide. Trump, who once described crypto as a scam, campaigned to stockpile Bitcoin reserves, regulate stablecoins, promote friendly crypto leaders, and create reasonable regulations that promote innovation rather than stifle American industries. Crypto leaders responded by funding Trump’s inaugural committee on cryptocurrencies with millions of dollars. This new approach offers a very large departure from the previous administration, which had a very hostile take on cryptocurrencies. Having dealt with the FTX exchange and many other crises that gave crypto a bad reputation, Trump has introduced his own meme coin, and his family members have helped create a crypto project called World Liberty Financial.
