Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The cryptocurrency industry that sunk tens of millions into the Trump campaign and inauguration has so far gotten everything its investors have wanted from the new president. The Securities and Exchange Commission is abandoning or pausing its cases against some of the biggest players in the industry while agreeing not to police the Wild West shootout that is the meme-coin market these days. They’ve got major influence in the Trump Cabinet, and the first-ever “crypto summit” will be held on Friday. But despite all these warm signals coming from the White House, the crypto market was kind of sucking in February. There were massive sell-offs, tentpole tokens like bitcoin were taking a beating, and much of the news cycle in crypto was dominated by how much of a messy scam it could be for politicians who got too involved.
But on Sunday, Trump, or one of his crypto advisers, had an idea. For months now, the president has been promising a strategic national stockpile for cryptocurrency — an idea heavily promoted by the industry as a shortcut for the U.S. to assert some financial dominance in crypto. Rather than make the difficult (and potentially legislative) push to create the stockpile, Trump simply revealed the assets that would be inside it.
In the social-media announcement, Trump wrote that his stockpile would help ensure that the “U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.” But it was also a fairly obvious play to the crypto crowd, juicing prices without having to actually do anything. The value of bitcoin rallied by $9,000 over the afternoon while the other coins involved (ethereum, solana, XRP, and cardano) all saw significant gains. Cardano, the least valuable of the digital tokens, saw its price jump nearly 100 percent.
But the easy win could not reverse the larger forces (weakish demand for bitcoin, massive crypto hacks) that, in February, stymied the asset class that is supposed to be divorced from the larger economy. Today, bitcoin lost roughly half of yesterday’s gains from the Trump bump. But more of a concern for Trump than the short-term value of these volatile tokens is the fact that many crypto bigwigs weren’t thrilled by his announcement. Big investors, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, thought that including any coins other than bitcoin was an error. Others — like Palantir co-founder and libertarian billionaire Trump fan and Elon Musk friend Joe Lonsdale — called the president’s stockpile dream a “crypto-bro scheme” that he didn’t want to realize with taxpayer money. Angel investor Jason Calacanis dismissed the idea as the latest “Trump pump” and “crypto grift.” Considering Calacanis’s close relationship to Trump’s “crypto czar,” David Sacks, this type of stuff may be a bad sign for the president on the crypto front:
If you tax Americans to buy crypto, don’t be surprised if the people revolt. pic.twitter.com/OoatPdolOl
— @jason (@Jason) March 2, 2025
Sacks, whose investment firm has massive investments in the five coins in the proposed stockpile, is hosting the White House’s crypto summit on Friday. Perhaps everything will be hashed out among Trump, his advisers with massive crypto investments, and the industry leaders they are hoping to satisfy. But Trump is now entering the difficult part of his courtship of the crypto world. So far, he’s lived up to the good will through simple actions under his office’s control — like forcing out ex-SEC chair Gary Gensler, killing civil actions against major firms, or freeing the crypto-libertarian champion Ross Ulbricht. But now he might actually need to do something to move the market. As crypto skeptic Molly White wrote, we may finally be arriving at the point where “words alone seem to be running out.”
