Colorado, always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is May 8th, 2025, and we are making a video to talk about something I’ve been wanting to discuss for quite some time but didn’t have the opportunity to. Once I finally got more information, I said, "You know what? We can talk about this." So, let me go ahead and share my screen.
Not too long ago, I tweeted this. Here we go. This was from February 10th, 2025, and I said, "VIP dinner got moved from the 22nd to the 1st." So, the super important meeting is now in early March. Many of you guessed correctly that what I was alluding to was a meeting with the president. Let me share my screen on this one. I’m going to share the entire screen to make it a lot easier to see.
Okay, so this was the invitation from the 22nd. I was going to attend the candlelight dinner with Trump, but it got moved to the 1st because there was some issue; Trump was meeting with Zelensky that week. But, you know, he’s the president of the United States, so he makes his own schedule. You don’t complain about it; you deal with it. I got all fired up, pushing hard, reading hundreds of documents, trying to put all these pieces together because this was kind of the capstone of a long arc of many confusing and strange turns since actually October of last year, or even earlier—September, I can’t remember.
I was in Jackson Hole at a conference called Salt, where I met some people who eventually ended up on the Trump transition team. We had a lot of discussions about what Trump wanted to do, and they mentioned an intention to appoint a "cryptozar," a crypto commission made up of industry leaders. All of these people were going to come together to figure out what the policy would be. I said, "Alright, that sounds great. We want you to win, and when you win, let’s talk."
I was at a ketamine retreat the week of the election, and when I came back, there were all these news stories saying Charles was going to be the cryptozar because Tam mentioned there was a strong possibility we’d be involved. Around the same time, we were heavily engaged in talks with Senator Tim Scott and had been doing a lot of work on the legislative side. We said, "Let’s see what the White House wants to do." We continued engaging and asked, "When is the interview for the cryptozar going to be?" They said they’d tell us. We waited and waited, heard nothing, and then David Sachs was announced.
I said, "Alright, they wanted to go in a different direction." They combined the cryptozar with the AISAR. It was kind of a strange play, but that’s okay. There was still this idea of a crypto commission. They announced Bo Hines as the chairman or executive director of the crypto commission, and then there was a lot of discussion about who would be on that and who wouldn’t. It was very confusing. Every time we talked to someone, we got mixed messages. Eventually, I decided to go straight to the source, talk to the president, and figure all this stuff out.
We looked at the schedule, talked to a bunch of people, and ironically, it was Snoop Dogg’s son who let me know about this candlelight dinner at Mar-a-Lago. I said, "You know what? I’ll go down there, and that’s where I’ll talk to him. That sounds great." The day I was flying out to Mar-a-Lago, we got a call saying, "Well, you’ve been disinvited." I said, "Excuse me, disinvited? I’ve been prepped for this for a while. I’m on the plane literally flying down to Mar-a-Lago." I insisted they explain more about this. They said, "Well, we’ll figure it out. There’s still a day or two to put these pieces together." I was meeting with Senator Scott, Bernie Moreno, and others at the time, so I said I’d still go down to Florida. After I met with all those guys, hopefully, we could figure out exactly why I was taken off the list.
I went down there, met with everyone, had a lovely time, and we had very meaningful discussions about policy. I even had a chance to talk to Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, about the stablecoin bill and market structure. We kept waiting for a call back from the people at Maggi Inc. about why we were disinvited. It didn’t make any sense. Unbeknownst to me at that time, there was a person who attended that event named Brian Ballard. An article just came out today, and I finally think I’ve put all the pieces together about what exactly happened. I was waiting until these pieces came together.
You can read the article too; let me share it with you. It just came out in Politico and it says, "From Trump Whisperer to West Wing Pariah: How Lobbyist Brian Ballard Angered Trump." It mentions an incident at Mar-a-Lago in March, which was the dinner I was talking about. The long and short of the story alleges that someone in Ballard’s orbit got a tweet sent out, and for some reason, someone in that circle didn’t want me at that dinner.
What I heard through the grapevine was that there was a tweet of mine where I was asked, "Why don’t you go meet up with Trump?" I replied, "I don’t want to pay $5 million for dinner." This was a reference to something in the XRP circle when Brad went down and met him. There was a $5 million donation that was flagged as the official excuse that came our way. According to the article, this guy kind of pushed for that reserve to go through, and everybody knew because I had talked to Brad and others that had I been asked about the reserve, I had already publicly stated that if we do a cryptocurrency reserve, it should probably only include Bitcoin.
You can see numerous interviews where I talked to David Gosh, and there were also prior tweets where I stated XRP would not be in the reserve, nor ADA or anything else. If they were going to do a reserve, it should only be Bitcoin. According to the article, as soon as it was tweeted, David Sachs was furious and tried to get everything reversed, but there wasn’t much they could do. They gradually walked it back. Then, right after that week, they were going to have the White House get-together. I said, "Well, ADA’s in the reserve now. I didn’t have any information." I woke up to my phone blowing up with all this news. I figured they didn’t want me at the dinner because they were going to announce ADA. At the time, I didn’t know about this Brian Ballard situation, so I thought, "Oh, they didn’t want me there because they didn’t like the optics of me talking to the president the day after ADA was added to the reserve." Fair game; it made a lot of sense.
I didn’t think much of it and figured there was this White House get-together on Friday. We called and they said, "Hey, we’ll get an invite out, and don’t worry, we’re going to send them on Monday." Then they didn’t come out. On Tuesday, they didn’t come out. On Wednesday, someone from the White House went to Lara Shin’s publication and told them, "Hey, Charles Hoskinson has nothing to do with any crypto policy. We’ve never talked to the guy. We have no relationship with him. He wasn’t invited to the Mar-a-Lago event." I just showed you the invitation, didn’t I, Lara?
So, they said that, and I was like, "What the hell? Why would they do that?" That’s so weird. You just don’t send me an invitation and then go to the press about it. I never understood what David’s issue was on this one. Then this Politico article finally put all the pieces together. According to Politico, this guy got a tweet about the reserve, ADA was included for some reason, and this same group of people didn’t want me there to interfere with it. They went ahead and got me off the list, which really pissed me off. After they did that, David got upset because he had a whole plan for how the reserve was supposed to run, and he thought I was behind it because ADA was on the list too.
I kind of got put in the doghouse for a little while on that one. Ironically, I have good relationships with other people in that orbit. I just did panels with Don Jr. and I’m doing one with Eric. I don’t dislike anyone in the Trump administration. This is the nature of Wall Street, the White House, and politics in Washington, D.C. It’s strange; there are a thousand people jockeying and lobbying and doing crazy things. I can’t for the life of me figure out all these twists and turns.
The good news is that there are co-equal branches of government. I understand the Senate and Congress, and we’ve made a lot of phenomenal progress there with the Genius Act and other things that didn’t get through closure. They’re going to have to negotiate and work. It looks like there’s some grandstanding, not an actual structural issue with the bill because I haven’t seen any requests for specific language otherwise. But progress is being made there.
On the executive side, it was pretty distasteful. I’ve never been invited to something, physically flown there, and then been disinvited without an explanation. The day after ADA gets added to the reserve, we’re told we’re going to the White House, and then on Wednesday, someone from the White House tells Lara Shen that we had nothing to do with it, we’re not connected to it at all, and we weren’t even invited to that Mar-a-Lago party. How did I know the president’s private schedule? Tell me, is that public record? People know weeks ahead of time where the president of the United States is going to be. Just saying, use some common sense.
When they asked us for comment, they sent it to our UK office at 10:00 at night and said they were publishing in 30 minutes. That’s a great, highly credible organization. Welcome to politics. It’s nothing personal in that administration; it just seems like there are some shaky things here and there. Everybody in the community got really excited about this, and I was too. I was really excited to sit down and systematically talk about how I view digital assets in general, breaking it down into real-world assets and what stablecoins are about, and how America can benefit from these things. I wanted to discuss how we need new securities regulations for lightweight securities that are trading 24/7, different ways to do disclosure regimes, and how to transcend the commodity-security argument that people had.
I thought it was the appropriate environment. We could have done it at the inauguration, but there, everybody only got like five minutes. I thought this dinner would have been a much more intimate setting to discuss these types of things. I had no conception that I was stepping into this large construction of all these things, and I had no idea that people had been lobbying quite aggressively behind the scenes for months about various issues. I thought for sure that people just wanted to talk about policy. It shows you I’m not a creature of the executive branch; I’m a creature of the legislative branch because they’re a lot more transparent about what they want, and it’s a lot easier over a good steak to talk about this stuff.
For what it’s worth, at some point, we’ll cross paths, and I think there have been some housecleaning and strategic changes that have worked their way through, and that’s a good thing. It’s pretty in the dark, actually, with everybody else about ADA being added to the reserve, and I could never parse exactly that behavior. What’s ironic about it is that because I didn’t have dinner with the president, suddenly all these people called me from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other places after the reserve came through, asking, "Did you tell the president to put ADA in the reserve?" I said, "I’ve never spoken to him. I’ve never directly spoken to him." They said, "That’s impossible. How did ADA get added if you’ve never talked to the president?" It’s pretty bizarre. This is the first time in my life where I’m saying I’m not talking to the president, and people in the press think I am, which usually it’s the other way around.
Welcome to Washington and all this stuff. I owe you guys an explanation about it, and that’s why I waited to make the video. I’ll leave a link right here for the Politico story, and you can read it yourselves. I think more are on the way too. No harm, no foul, no ill will on the Trump side. They seem to be doing pretty good work, and everyone we’ve engaged with there has been easy to talk to. But there’s definitely some lobbying around the core, especially at a lot of these events that are on the core, like these White House get-togethers and other things.
A lot of people said, "Don’t make this video. If you make this video, you’re going to lose access, or you’ll be persona non grata." Well, David did go to Lara and say we have nothing to do with it, so I have no idea. I’ll just be honest about it and tell people what I saw and heard. I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to get that picture with Don and talk to him and share my knowledge about it. I hope to speak before the Senate at some point, and we’ll get it done there with the market structure bill and the Genius Act or some variant of it. We’re still talking to people on a regular basis. Regulation is done through lawmaking and rulemaking, and sometimes through enforcement. We’re doing all three as an industry. We’re fighting bad enforcement, promoting good rulemaking through meetings with various regulatory bodies, and we’re going to get some good laws passed. These laws will last beyond any particular administration.
The Genius Act was not written for Donald Trump, no matter what Elizabeth Warren wants to say. It was written for an industry that’s $240 billion in size, with $120 million in transactions a month that can grow to a multi-trillion dollar industry, effectively dollarizing parts of the world that aren’t dollarized. It is in our national interest to be a leader in this industry if we want the dollar to remain the world standard. That’s a fact. That bill would be just as relevant in January of 2029 as it is today, May 8th, 2025. It’ll be just as relevant in 2035 as it is today in 2025. There will be different administrations, and it’s the same with the market structure bill and these other things. Unfortunately, there’s just such a toxic vitriol of partisan politics that everything is now viewed through the lens of one particular administration, one particular person. It’s hard to widen the aperture and see that there’s more than just one particular person involved.
Even something as simple as being invited to dinner and then being disinvited without an explanation is a challenge. But at least I have an explanation now. Someone on that side lobbied not to have me there because they wanted the reserve the way it was, and they knew that if I was asked at that dinner about the reserve, I would have said, as I’ve said before, that only Bitcoin should be in it. We have no inclusion or exclusion criteria, no ratings criteria, and we don’t have any risk management provisions. We don’t know the custody. There are no standards on how to participate in governance and staking. It makes no sense to try to put an arbitrary list of coins in; you should only do Bitcoin. A person would have heard that from the president and thought, "That makes a lot of sense. He’s a reasonable guy." But I wasn’t there to say that, and at least now I know why.
Thank you, Politico, for answering a question I tried really hard to get an answer to. A lot of my friends who are very well-connected in Washington spent quite a bit of time talking to people very close to this, and I got fragments here and there. Finally, I understand why these pieces came together. So, those who got me disinvited, thanks. It looks like it worked out really well for you, didn’t it? The rest of the industry is actually working out pretty well for us too. We’re moving forward with regulation, and we’re going to get the things done that we need to do. As a nation, we will be the world’s leader in cryptocurrencies. That’s my goal. We have the policy office; Joel Telner is running it, Cynthia is working there, and we have Karen Wheeler, the former deputy secretary of state of Wyoming. We have a lot of good friends, like FS Vector, who are regularly engaging with people.
Every person I’ve talked to and engaged with has been very friendly and easy to talk to, whether they’re CFTC commissioners, SEC commissioners, or at any event. Everybody just wants to get this problem solved and move forward. The only barrier right now is that a few Democrats have decided to equate Trump with crypto, and thus crypto is bad because Trump is bad. That’s their talking point. They’ll eventually find another shiny thing to pay attention to, and then we can go back to the business of taking care of an industry that employs millions of Americans and creates trillions of dollars of value.
As for the rest of it, welcome to politics. It’s distasteful and serpentine, but this is what people do. The truth always comes out, whether it’s through Politico, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal. Of course, they put their spin on it. There’s never going to be an article written that’s nice about anything. When I was at that panel at the DCC, the New York Times came up to me and asked for a comment on the World Liberty panel I did. I told them to pound sand. I’m not going to let them write a negative article about Trump.
I was interviewed by Reuters over in France, trying to talk about Midnight and fourth-generation cryptocurrencies and other things. They asked me about World Liberty six times in one hour, and I was like, "Just go to hell. I’m not going to talk about it." He has every right to participate in this industry like anybody else and compete fairly. Why are you punishing someone who’s just participating in the industry? They have no interest in writing nice articles. But then, every now and then, when people do some shady shenanigans or try to manipulate events, stuff like that pisses people off, and those people talk to journalists. It’s very clear that people in the administration talked to people in Politico because they were upset
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