The White House's first encryption summit was still a lot of noise but little action

In the early morning of March 8, 2025, the White House held its first crypto summit.

At the summit, Trump repeated the executive order on crypto asset reserves signed earlier, and said that the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department would explore new ways to accumulate more Bitcoin for reserves, provided that taxpayers would not pay any price. It ordered federal agencies to take inventory of the crypto assets currently held by the US government and determine how to transfer them to the Treasury Department to be kept in a new US crypto asset reserve.

Since this meeting was a closed-door meeting and was not broadcast live to the public, in the limited public live broadcast information, the participants of the White House Crypto Summit took turns to speak, but most of them were a series of progress in the crypto field after Trump took office, as well as praise for Trump himself.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant talked about the establishment of strategic Bitcoin reserves and crypto asset inventories, the regulation of crypto assets, and the federal framework for stablecoins, and said that the Treasury Department will work closely with the IRS and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to revoke and modify guidelines that have harmed the ability of crypto asset companies to conduct business in the United States.

Trump said that the House of Representatives and the Senate are expected to pass stablecoin legislation before the August recess.

Performance is more important than substance

From the main points of the summit, the Trump administration and the participants have released a lot of grand declarations as usual, such as the United States will become a cryptocurrency center, establish a digital version of gold reserves, and end hostile policies against the crypto industry. It seems to have given an ambitious blueprint. However, behind these bold words, the details of the actual implementation of the policy are still unclear, especially in terms of stablecoin legislation, banking compliance access, and crypto asset taxation. There is no exact timetable or implementation path.

But for the market, the most important expectation of this summit is not the grand slogan that the United States will become a crypto center, but whether it can really see a specific and feasible implementation plan. Although the Trump administration has repeatedly declared that it is pro-crypto, if it cannot provide the corresponding legislation, supervision and implementation details, the policy dividends expected by the market will still remain on paper.

In other words, after repeatedly promoting the pro-crypto policy slogan, whether supporting measures can be actually introduced is the real core of market attention. The current industry's demand for a clear and stable regulatory environment is becoming more and more urgent. It is for this reason that the industry has high expectations for this summit. Judging from the current situation, the results of the summit are more at the level of political statements, lacking substantive content to further promote the implementation of policies.

Therefore, although this first crypto summit in the White House gathered many bigwigs and senior regulators, the overall performance was still greater than the substance. Trump's pro-crypto attitude is more of a political operation. He showed his support in a high-profile and enthusiastic way, but he avoided and delayed the key regulatory issues that really affect the industry's prospects. The speeches of many participants on the scene seemed enthusiastic, but in fact, most of them were just flattering or echoing Trump's political tone, which made the key issues that really need to be discussed, such as compliance, taxation, and market order, covered up in the noisy flattery.

In other words, although the summit was very loud, it was more like a political statement or a political show, and it was more about using the summit to create public opinion, and it was far from a real shaping of the crypto regulatory landscape.

ADA, SOL, and XRP were mentioned only because they ranked in the top five by market capitalization

Interestingly, according to the White House announcement, the executive order signed by Trump includes two parts: the strategic reserve and inventory of cryptocurrencies. The strategic reserve will only contain BTC (the digital asset with the largest value storage), using about 200,000 tokens held by the government through criminal and civil forfeiture over the years.

The other is a digital asset reserve that includes assets other than Bitcoin, which may be XRP, ADA, ETH, and SOL (announced by the president last weekend) and possibly other assets. The main difference between reserves and inventories is that the government will not actively look for ways to buy more inventory assets. The government will only explore the use of government funds (if they can find a budget-neutral way to do this) to purchase BTC. The Secretary of the Treasury may determine responsible management strategies, including assets that may be sold from the U.S. digital asset inventory.

In an exclusive interview with David Sacks by Bloomberg before the meeting, the crypto czar responded to the question of whether ADA, SOL, and XRP would be included in the U.S. cryptocurrency reserves and why the president mentioned them? He said: Well, the president mentioned the top five cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. So I think people are interpreting this a bit too much. He just mentioned the top five that we actually hold.

He emphasized that again, we need to do an accounting (referring to the United States to begin auditing existing cryptocurrency holdings). Today we are not sure whether the federal government owns these other copycat cryptocurrencies. We know that the government owns Bitcoin. I believe the government also owns some Ethereum. As for the others, I am not so sure. That's why we need to do an accounting. Frankly speaking, no one has yet been able to give a clear answer about what assets the federal government owns. Part of the reason for this problem is that we had no crypto asset strategy at all before this. That's why we missed the opportunity to accumulate a lot of value for the American people.

Recently, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson also said that he was not aware of Trump's plan to include ADA in the strategic reserve. We know nothing about ADA being included in the strategic reserve, which is news to me. We never even knew about it, and no one even talked to us about it.

It can be seen that the concept of crypto strategic reserves and crypto asset inventories within the US government is more in the stage of unformed policy ideas and public opinion declarations. There is no clear official accounting and regulatory plan for the actual holdings of these altcoins, management strategies, or even whether they will be included in the strategic reserve itself. The so-called government owning the top five market value assets is more like an ambiguous external statement, or it may just be an example mentioned in political discourse.

In this process, on the one hand, the Trump administration wants to send a strong signal that we are seriously building a crypto asset reserve system to highlight its pro-crypto stance; on the other hand, it lacks a refined institutional arrangement for the current status of holdings and future purchase plans. David Sacks also admitted that the scale of altcoin holdings still needs to be audited and sorted out, and the compliance and accounting systems of various departments within the government and even between the federal and state governments are not fully prepared to accept such assets. This has led to an embarrassing situation. The official high-profile announcement of the layout of crypto assets, but the market found that the relevant information lacked substantive transparency, and even the founders of the project were unaware of being included in the reserve. In response, SOL fell 9% in a short period of time, with a minimum of around $137, and ADA and XRP both fell by about 7%.

In addition, according to Decrypt, David Sacks said in an interview that Trump's personal crypto projects (such as controversial meme coins) have nothing to do with government policy. When asked whether Trump's cryptocurrency projects affect industry regulation, he said: I don't think it has any impact, it has nothing to do with our work here.

When asked about Trump's personal investment in crypto assets such as Bitcoin, David Sacks said these are facts without evidence.

Summary

The current situation of US crypto regulation is in a delicate stage where it urgently needs to take the lead externally, but cannot reach a clear consensus internally due to political games. This creates a huge contrast between the rhetoric of this summit and the implementation of substantive policies. If the government continues to use crypto policies as a political tool in this way, rather than coordinating with the industry, regulators and Congress in a practical and in-depth manner, the drama of thunder and rain will probably continue to be staged, and the policy dividends that can truly bring long-term stability and compliance development to the industry will still be difficult to see.