Crypto News: The crypto executive order is here

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President Donald Trump signed the long-awaited executive order on crypto on Thursday — and the market shrugged.

The order, under the grand title Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology, affirmed the "crucial role" played by the digital asset industry in fostering innovation and economic development in the US. And it established that an explicit policy of the Trump White House would be to "support the responsible growth of use of digital assets, blockchain technology, and related technologies across all sectors of the economy."

The executive action creates a working group that will advise the White House on digital asset policies; that group is tasked with submitting a report to the president within six months, with recommendations for a regulatory framework and legislative proposals.

Without ever mentioning Bitcoin explicitly, the order also charged that working group with evaluating the "potential creation and maintenance of a national digital asset stockpile," which might be "derived from cryptocurrencies lawfully seized by the Federal Government through its law enforcement efforts."

This is very different language from the idea of a Bitcoin Fort Knox that would see the US government buying vast amounts of the token as a strategic reserve asset, or that would see the Federal Reserve selling off some of its gold as floated by Republican Senator Cythnia Lummis of Wyoming.

Lummis had earlier on Thursday caused a brief spike in the price of Bitcoin with a cryptic post on X — one that turned out to refer to her getting confirmed as the first-ever chair of a new Senate Panel on Digital Assets. Bitcoin reversed course, though, when the executive order came out.

Stablecoins potentially stand to benefit from the order's explicit prohibition on central bank digital currencies, a type of sovereign digital money opposed by a diverse bench that includes anti-government conspiracy theorists and former presidential hopefuls Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis.

"You find them exciting?" President Trump said at the signing, which included an order on artificial intelligence. "They might not be, except they're going to make a lot of money for the country."

Hearing them out

"At least for now, the market is speaking and it's saying that it wants memecoins."

Joe Weisenthal

Co-host, Odd Lots

A reflection on the presidential memecoin and what is says about the overall crypto market in the Odd Lots newsletter

Charting it out

Swiss Bitcoin fans are pushing for a national vote on enshrining the largest cryptocurrency in the Swiss constitution. They want the digital asset to sit alongside the dollar, the euro and gold in the central bank's reserves.