First-ever White House crypto summit leaves some investors unhappy

Rob Wile

Fri, Mar 7, 2025, 7:28 PM 4 min read

The White House hosted its first-ever “crypto summit” Friday, convening top executives from various digital asset firms to discuss the Trump administration’s commitment to rolling back the aggressive regulatory posture the Biden administration took toward the industry.

However, some in the crypto world were left disappointed that the Trump administration did not signal more active support for the industry, leading the prices of the very assets the summit was supposed to acclaim to sag Friday.

The price of bitcoin was down about 3% in late-afternoon trading and was set to finish the week down approximately 7%, to $87,000.

The groundwork for the lackluster reaction was laid late Thursday, when Trump’s “crypto czar,” venture capitalist David Sacks, announced that the president had signed an order to create a “strategic bitcoin reserve.”

While that measure has been aggressively pushed by the crypto community, the order indicated the reserve would only comprise current bitcoin holdings previously seized by federal law enforcement agencies. A separate “digital asset stockpile” would also be created to hold non-bitcoin digital tokens, like ethereum and ripple, that have also been seized in enforcement proceedings.

However, the executive order gave no explicit guarantee or timetable for the government to begin making new cryptocurrency purchases outright.

If such purchases were to ever occur, it said, they would be undertaken in a budget-neutral way and at no additional cost to taxpayers.

To be sure, the very existence of a White House crypto summit, let alone a strategic reserve, represents a sea change for an industry that has long fought to gain mainstream acceptance. And despite its recent declines, the price of bitcoin remains about 25% higher than its level before Trump secured a second presidential term in early November.

Trump himself has jumped headfirst into the crypto world, launching his own “meme coin” just prior to his inauguration in January that briefly saw his paper net worth explode by billions. The coin’s value has since plunged.

While Trump on Friday doubled down on his desire to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the world” and a leader in cutting-edge financial technology, some investors were still left wanting more.

“Trump is now officially ‘off the hook’ for what the Bitcoin community did for him,” Jeff Park, an executive with the Bitwise crypto investment group, said in a post on X Friday before the summit concluded, referring to the creation of the strategic reserve. “If you want something else later, he’ll want something else from now on.”