Crypto Markets Rally as Industry Leaders Dine with President - ’Steak Talk’ or Policy Shift?

Digital asset prices surged 8% intraday after leaked photos showed Bitcoin ETF issuers and blockchain CEOs breaking bread with the White House. The ’steakhouse summit’ sparked immediate speculation about regulatory thaw—or just another photo op for politicians desperate to seem tech-savvy.

Insiders whisper the discussion touched on stablecoin legislation, while cynics note the timing coincides with election fundraising season. Either way, traders bought the rumor—as Wall Street bankers grumble about being excluded from the guest list.

One thing’s certain: in crypto, even dinner reservations move markets faster than SEC filings.

It has real utility now: dinner with the president! And maybe a tour!!!

So, no, I don’t think it is.

$TRUMP is now a utility coin.

Judging by the site, they appear to be targeting people who have $380,000+ to drop on a memecoin utility coin, who like random capitalization and dislike grammar, and who find a 1990s infomercial vibe enticing.

I don’t know who resides in the overlapping middle of that Venn diagram, but I’d love to find out.

More importantly, this raises the question of why people think being one of 220 people in a room with the president is worth putting $380,000 at risk.

The answer could be benign: entertainment value, bragging rights or simple fandom.

But it could also be sinister: buying influence with the president.

Call me naive, but I think it’s the former — mostly because the wacky website seems to signal that this really is for entertainment purposes only and that attending the dinner will not get you pardoned of any federal crimes.

It feels to me like one of those Nigerian prince emails that were deliberately written with poor grammar, implausible stories and blatant red flags to ensure that only the easiest targets would respond to them.

(Scammers don’t want to waste time on anyone who’s likely to figure out they’re being scammed.)

The Trump Dinner website feels similarly calculated to select for those who really do think that being one of 220 people in a room with the president is worth tens of thousands of dollars (with no expectations of anything else).

The crypto-skeptic Molly White totals it up to about $1 billion, although that’s just a partial accounting (her total leaves out some big ticket items like the 20% of the US Bitcoin mining company that Hut8 recently awarded Eric Trump).

But I don’t think you can blame crypto for that — as Bagehot notes, capital (in any form) will Flow to where it’s most wanted, like water finding its level.

Capital does seem to flow disproportionately from crypto, however. 

By comparison, Amazon is reportedly paying $40 million for the rights to a documentary on the first lady that they know approximately no one will watch.

That seems at least as egregious as any crypto money that the Trump family has earned — but it’s only 0.002% of Amazon’s market capitalization.

By contrast, the $1 billion that the Trump family has probably extracted from crypto is 0.3% of crypto’s market capitalization — 150x more.

Big picture, I think that’s because crypto, where everything is financialized and tradeable, commands attention far in excess of its market value.

That’s good because it creates opportunities for newsletter writers who might otherwise be stocking shelves at Home Depot or something.

But it’s also bad because it creates disproportionately large opportunities for grifting.

I hope so — partly because I’m not ready to start my near-retirement job at Home Depot just yet. 

But also because I still believe in the Resistance Money thesis that the world is a better place with bitcoin than without it and Chris Dixon’s thesis that crypto can be an anti-corporate, decentralized iteration of the internet.

For a timely reminder of the latter, you might have a listen to the conversation that Tyler Cowen had with Chris Dixon this week. 

Among other things, Cowen predicts that “without open source, we might end up with two governments, US and China.” 

(Because every other government will be outsourced to an AI model made in either the US or China.)

For better and worse, crypto is open-source money and markets.

Not if they had the hood up, no.

But that’s just me.

Mark Zuckerberg famously wore pajamas to a meeting with Sequoia Capital and that worked out pretty well, so maybe Maller’s new Bitcoin venture, Twenty One, will work out too.

(On the other hand, there’s also the counterexample of Sam Bankman-Fried wearing shorts and a T-shirt on stage with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, so maybe not.)

More concretely, Twenty One “will introduce two key performance metrics”: Bitcoin per share (BPS) and Bitcoin return rate (BRR).

This is a take on the “bitcoin yield” metric that Michael Saylor invented for Strategy (née MicroStrategy), so I assume that Twenty One’s business plan is to sell equity above NAV (which is not really a business plan — it’s just financial engineering).

That worked for Strategy, of course, but Strategy was first and it had the special sauce of Michael Saylor.

I’m not sure that’s a repeatable, well, strategy.

But the CEO’s photo will probably filter out any investors who agree with me.

It will be up to markets to decide whether Twenty One (and Trump’s dinner) is where capital is “most to be made of.”

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