President Donald Trump almost fully embraced crypto on Wednesday, but a White House report on digital assets didn’t mention bitcoin or digital assets reserves.
The more than 166-page report has drawn praise from industry leaders for the approach to the industry and embrace of the cryptocurrency market.
Bo Hines, executive director for the White House crypto council, said the report was focused on establishing a regulatory framework for digital assets, rather than getting into the specifics of bitcoin or a digital assets reserve.
“We also wanted to give credence to the work and the developments happening across other ecosystems,” Hines said. “We’re enormous fans of bitcoin and the bitcoin community and we want to deliver for them as well and I’m certain that we will.”
The report is the culmination of President Donald Trump’s pledges on the campaign trail last year to be a “crypto president.”
In January, Trump asked a crypto working group with developing the framework announced on Wednesday.
On July 18, Trump signed the GENIUS act into law which attaches cryptocurrency tokens to a liquid asset like U.S. dollars.
Two weeks ago the House of Representatives signed the CLARITY act, which allows crypto to maintain a broad regulatory framework. The U.S. Senate is taking up its own version of the bill but steep divisions in committee have yielded uncertainty for its future.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said the Clarity Act’s language defining “digital commodities” is too broad and could extend its protections to non-crypto companies.
This could include company stocks or personal “meme coins” as long as they are associated with something that has value outside of the digital asset like a celebrity figure or company.
“Under the House bill, a publicly traded company like Meta or Tesla could simply decide to put its stock on the blockchain and, poof, it would escape all SEC regulation,” Warren said.
Sergey Navaroz, co-founder of the blockchain company Chainlink, praised the White House report in a social media post Wednesday.
“I think the president’s clear placing of our industry as a national priority will be seen as a critical and historic moment for our industry and for the United States financial system’s role globally,” Nazarov wrote.
