The cryptocurrency investors and executives who crowded into the White House for a summit with Donald Trump on Friday represented billions in net worth.

They also represented more than $11 million in donations to Trump’s inaugural committee, a review of the guest list by The Intercept shows.

The list of invitees to the crypto summit offers a window into the tight links between Trump and the crypto world, which spent heavily last year to back candidates who favored looser regulation.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has dropped legal action against several leading crypto companies and on Friday hosted the White House meeting that drew alarm from ethics watchdogs.

Ahead of the White House summit, Trump signed an executive order creating a government bitcoin reserve — essentially telling the government to hold onto the bitcoin it has already acquired through forfeitures and directing it to find “budget-neutral strategies” for acquiring more. He also called on the government to maintain its holdings of more volatile “altcoins” other than bitcoin.

“From this day on,” Trump said at the summit, “America will follow the rule that every bitcoiner knows very well, never sell your bitcoin. That’s a little phrase that they have. Is it right? Who the hell knows.”

Watchdogs question Trump’s sudden embrace of crypto.

“The outsized influence the crypto industry seems to have on the Trump administration is concerning,” said Delaney Marsco, director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog group. “When you put it in the context of the campaign donations, the inaugural fund donations, it paints a really troubling picture of potential corruption.”

Running Down the List

The invite list for Friday’s summit, as confirmed by White House crypto and AI czar David Sacks, included companies that donated heavily to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Companies can give unlimited donations to that fund — making it an attractive way for them to curry favor. Large tech companies including Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft rushed to donate to the fund after Trump’s victory left them in political peril.

Among the companies invited to the summit, Crypto.com, Kraken, and Paradigm gave $1 million to the inauguration effort. They were outdone by the trading platform Robinhood, which gave $2 million, and by Ripple, which gave $5 million worth of its........

© The Intercept