Quotes
Last year, I promised to make America the Bitcoin superpower of the world and crypto capital of the planet, and we're taking historic action to deliver on that promise,
Trump told the as-sembled room of executives
We never thought that we would get attacked the way we did in our own backyard after trying to do the right thing for so many years,
Cameron Winklevoss told the meetingUnfortunately, in recent years, the US government has foolishly sold tens of thousands of additional Bitcoin that were worth billions and billions of dollars had they not sold them,
Trump said in his opening remarksThe government representatives expressed that there has been a negative regime towards the crypto industry, and that regime is now coming to an end,
says Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, who attended the summit
I did not expect people that were so senior to be at the summit,
Nazarov saysThis industry was kind of unfairly suppressed from reaching its potential in the U.S. system,
Nazarov saysWhether or not they’re motivated to trace every single victim in that case, whether victims have come forward, and whose claims have not been dealt with—that is something that's going to have to be looked at,
Yadav says
The people that should be in front of him are in front of him, but there are also people who shouldn't be in front of him who are in front of him,
says Avik Roy, co-founder and chairman of the think tank Foundation for Research on Equal OpportunityIt would have been a pretty clearly a cronyist outcome where well-connected people were able to get the government to buy their tokens without really any obvious strategic rationale for doing so,
Roy saysWhen crypto companies spent over a hundred million dollars in the 2024 elections, they created a new playbook for the purchase of large-scale political power in America,
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, wrote in an email statement to TIME
This is a very important day in your lives,
President Donald Trump told crypto executives at the White House on March 7.That coin may be worth more than FIFA in the end,
Trump said in responseWe haven’t seen something like that before … and now we’re seeing the Trump administration move very quickly around their idea of this ‘crypto strategic reserve’,
Schaffzin said
This scandal has only served to further highlight the systemic risks surrounding crypto,
the CPA authors writeCrypto money played such an important role in the election,
Bruce Freed, CPA president, said
This spending was incredibly bipartisan … [but] like a lot of things over the last six weeks [since Trump took power], I think the pace of what’s unfolded in the crypto industry has been accelerated by some of the executive appointments Trump has made in this space. But I think maybe the overall regulatory environment through Congress possibly wouldn’t have been dramatically different under Harris compared to Trump.”
Asked whether the outlook on crypto would have been less concerning had Kamala Harris become president, Hanna saidThe Treasury and Commerce Department will also explore new pathways to accumulate additional bitcoin holdings for the reserve provided it is done at no cost to taxpayers,
Trump noted
My administration is working to end the federal bureaucracies' war on crypto, which was really going pretty wildly during Biden until the election came about,
Trump saidThis (strategic reserve) is going to be the biggest point of contention for many of us,
said JP Richardson, co-founder and CEO of Exodus, a Bitcoin wallet developer
What everyone really needs to have at this point is clarity on what the level of scrutiny and intensity of regulation will be, who the key regulators will be,
said Yesha Yadav, associate dean and professor of law at Vanderbilt University