President Trump is holding the first crypto summit at the White House Friday, featuring investors, CEOs and founders of crypto companies. Many in that world also hope Trump spells out a clearer path involving little regulation in the future, while Trump says he will announce the details of a new crypto reserve for the federal government. Paul Solman reports.

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

• Amna Nawaz:
• President Trump is holding the first crypto summit at the White House tomorrow, featuring investors, CEOs and founders of crypto companies.
• Many in that world also hope that Trump spells out a clearer path involving little regulation in the future. And Trump says he will announce the details of a new crypto reserve for the federal government.
• Geoff Bennett:
• Estimates vary widely, but surveys have found anywhere from 7 to 28 percent of U.S. adults invest in crypto. The market’s total value is estimated around $3 trillion at the moment.
• There are also real concerns about the stability of crypto and similar digital assets and whether President Trump has potential conflicts of interest.
• Our Paul Solman breaks it down for us.
• Paul Solman:
• Let’s start with some basics. A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is a bit of computer code, really just a unique string of dozens of characters that identifies your ownership of some strictly digital asset, existing only in what my mother disparagingly called cyberspace.
• Neha Narula, MIT Digital Currency Initiative:
• So, that’s really different than most of the other assets that we think about in the world. Bitcoin itself is classified as a commodity, like things like gold, but those commodities have a real-world analog component. There’s gold sitting in a vault somewhere. There’s a bar or there’s a coin.
• Bitcoin’s purely digital, digital first.
• Paul Solman:
• When I first covered cryptocurrency back in 2013, one Bitcoin was worth about $125, five years later, more than $7,000. Now a whole Bitcoin is selling near $90,000. So what’s its appeal?
• Vic Laranja, Crypto Content Creator:
• If I want to send money to somebody, it has to pass through multiple institutions to get to them. With crypto, I don’t need to wait. The money is liquid. You can have it instantly. It’s almost free to send it, and that is innovation. It’s just better.
• Paul Solman:
• And Bitcoin is supposed to be even scarcer than gold, as there’s an absolute limit to the supply, unlike government currencies like the dollar, which can suffer inflation, and in cases like Germany in 1923 and Zimbabwe and Venezuela more recently, hyperinflation.
• Plus, all transactions are publicly displayed on something called a blockchain, tracked on every computer that uses the software.
• Neha Narula:
• Another huge component of whether or not something is a good store of value is whether people believe in it, whether they have decided it’s a good store of value. So it’s kind of got these dual sides. You need to have certain properties that we can talk about pretty rationally, but then there’s this narrative component.
• Paul Solman:
• One part of the narrative, Bitcoin will gradually replace currencies like the dollar as a form of payment, but given the volatility of its value:
• Zeke Faux, Author, “Number Go Up”: If you’re talking to anyone who’s saying that Bitcoin is going to be used for payments, that’s kind of a fringe idea. Most Bitcoiners now just stick to the idea that the price will go up forever, and that we will all get rich.
• Paul Solman:
• OK, that’s a digital asset like Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, and now thousands of others. But what about meme coins in general and the Trump coin in particular?
• Molly White, Crypto Researcher and Software Engineer: Meme coins are crypto assets that are themed around a specific idea or sometimes a person. Generally, there is no business behind a meme coin project. There’s no sort of greater purpose, but they are used as vehicles for speculation.
• Paul Solman:
• Meme coins have become very popular of late. One of the most well-known is Dogecoin, long-hyped by Elon Musk. It’s based on a Shiba Inu dog meme and has had enduring value, but most meme coins don’t.
• Molly White:
• The asset is worth whatever you can sell it for and you better try to do it quick before it goes to zero.
• Vic Laranja:
• There are over five million meme coins; 99 percent of them go to zero.
• Paul Solman:
• It’s a game. The goal, get in early and hope that, to use the old Wall Street expression, a greater fool will come along and pay a higher price.
• Vic Laranja:
• We call it vaporware. There’s no promise or utility with a meme coin, other than the connection to the idea.
• Paul Solman:
• In January, President Trump announced his own meme coin.
• Molly White:
• The Trump Token was one of the biggest meme coins that we have ever seen launched. President Trump, just before his inauguration, launched a meme coin themed around himself. Shortly after, his wife launched a meme coin called Melania Token, which came a couple days later.
• Paul Solman:
• What happened when the Trump meme coin came out on the market?
• Vic Laranja:
• Insanity. It was one of the craziest nights I have ever experienced in crypto ever. Like, it was nuts, because no one believed that it was real. Everyone thought it was a scam. Everyone thought that his account was hacked.
• Paul Solman:
• But the Trump coin was real, one billion of them to be released over three years. Two hundred million were released to the market. The coin’s creators own the remaining 800 million.
• Vic Laranja:
• I was like, OK, I’m going to put a little bit of money into this, because if I’m wrong, that’s going to suck. And this is the amount of money that I’m OK with just completely losing.
• Paul Solman:
• In fact, Laranja says he made a little money on his Trump coin bet. But if you invested late, you sure didn’t.
• Zeke Faux:
• A small number of people got in early and profited from this Trump coin. The majority of people who bought the coin ended up losing money. And they can see this because you can track transactions on the blockchain.
• Paul Solman:
• Hundreds of thousands of crypto accounts lost money on the bet, amounting to billions in cumulative losses.
• Meanwhile, the Trump-affiliated creators of the coin made some $100 million in fees alone, plus presumably profits from the coin itself.
• Molly White:
• About 80 percent of the token supply was allocated to Trump and Trump entities. And so, based on the token price, he potentially makes quite a lot of money off of that token.
• Paul Solman:
• But to some in the crypto community, the Trump coin’s downside is more that it’s a gateway to scamming.
• Vic Laranja:
• Because he basically opened the floodgates for people to scam without being scared of it. People in the space call it crime season. That’s what started. Crime season started.
• Paul Solman:
• Now, President Trump’s views on crypto have evolved. In 2021, he called Bitcoin a scam. But with the Biden administration tough on crypto in general, supporters began to back Trump and his reelection bid.
• Zeke Faux:
• David Bailey, who runs “Bitcoin” magazine, which is the organizer of the annual Bitcoin conference that draws thousands of Bitcoiners from around the world, he got together a group of a few dozen of the top Bitcoin investors and got them to agree to donate the maximum amount to Trump, which, if you count all the committees and everything, is $844,600 each.
• Paul Solman:
• Trump’s pledge?
• Donald Trump, President of the United States: The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.
• (Cheering)
• Paul Solman:
• In part by overhauling regulations.
• Zeke Faux:
• And, so far, he’s taken a number of steps in that direction. SEC has been dropping investigations and lawsuits against a number of crypto companies. One of the SEC lawyers who took the lead on some of these crypto enforcement actions has been punished by being transferred to the I.T. department.
• I mean, there’s a huge conflict of interest here. Trump has his own crypto businesses, and his administration is now deciding an entirely new set of rules that are going to govern this industry.
• Paul Solman:
• Trump’s also planning a U.S. crypto strategic reserve to include Bitcoin and other tokens, which could boost the value of the president’s own crypto ventures, of which there are several.
• Molly White:
• So it started with him launching several NFT projects that were themed around him. He also is a major beneficiary of a company called World Liberty Financial, which is a crypto-based project that plans to launch some sort of a crypto application in the near future. He receives something like 75 percent of the proceeds from that project.
• His TRUTH Social platform, which he owns, has been talking about launching a crypto segment, where they would allow for crypto trading. They have spoken about holding crypto assets themselves. So he has very deep involvement in the crypto world these days.
• Paul Solman:
• And that raises another issue.
• Molly White:
• Members of the government are not supposed to receive money from people who are trying to influence policy, and these new crypto projects provide a very direct way for such people to do so, often in ways that can be a little bit more challenging to trace than, say, a bank transfer.
• Paul Solman:
• If, that is, anyone is trying to trace them at all.
• For the “PBS News Hour,” Paul Solman.