NASHVILLE — On Saturday morning at around 11:00 A.M. at the world’s biggest bitcoin conference of the year, thousands of people stood in a queue that snaked the expo hall of Music City Center.
It was a multi-hour wait to get through Secret Service’s tight security protocol and into the highly barricaded section of the main floor where the former president would soon take to the Nakamoto main stage and deliver an address outlining what a second Donald Trump White House would mean for bitcoin. Many in line were sporting a mix of “Make America Great Again” and “Make Bitcoin Great Again” baseball caps and passing the time speculating about what the Republican presidential nominee might say.
At the same time, one level down in the conference complex, the GOP pick was testing out his talking points at a roundtable with some of the biggest names in the crypto industry — the same people who have collectively contributed tens of millions of dollars to his campaign.
Participants included Gemini co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal — who had also attended a fundraiser that raised $12 million for Trump hosted by venture investor David Sacks at his home in San Francisco, and Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick. Cantor Fitzgerald serves as a custodian for assets belonging to the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin tether.
Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a former State Department official, former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy — as well as musicians Kid Rock and Billy Ray Cyrus sat side-by-side with the country’s top bitcoin miners and industry experts. Riot CEO Jason Les, Marathon Digital Holdings CEO Fred Thiel, CleanSpark CEO Zach Bradford, Exacore CEO Chris Cook, and mining expert Amanda Fabiano were all in the room on Saturday.
Notably, bitcoin billionaire Michael Saylor wasn’t there, though he was in Nashville on Friday to deliver an address. Saylor founded MicroStrategy in 1989, which has a business in enterprise software and cloud-based services but derives the vast majority of its value from its bitcoin holdings.
Paying for face time with Trump
An invitation that circulated ahead of the event advertised top-tier tickets for $844,600 for a seat at the roundtable, which is the maximum donation amount permitted for individuals to give to Trump and the Republican Party’s largest joint fundraising committee, known as the Trump 47 Committee. A next level down included a photo with the former president at $60,000 per person or $100,000 per couple, according to the invitation.
Multiple participants told CNBC the bitcoin miners who attended paid a slightly reduced fee of around $500,000 to attend a mix of events that day, which included a reception hosted by crypto exchange Gemini, a photo with the president, a seat at the crypto roundtable, and a place in the front row for Trump’s keynote address.
It was a steep price tag to gain access to the closed-door working group with the former president, where attendees had to forfeit their smartphones to a pouch that blocked incoming and outgoing signals.
Many of the miners who joined the fundraising events in Nashville were also part of a closed-door meeting held with the former president in Mar-a-Lago in early July.
Trump said on Saturday that his campaign has raised $25 million from the crypto industry since it began accepting cryptocurrency donations in May. That’s a lot of money for a sector emerging from a bear market and a mass wash-out following a slew of bankruptcies and criminal convictions.
Multiple participants who spoke to CNBC noted that the roster of attendees was comprised of sector leaders who run companies, and not the whales who have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin, signifying just how strongly the sector is trying to collaborate to make it easier to do business in the U.S.
“He was impressed to see how this industry works together,” said Les, the Riot CEO.
According to Les, Trump said he’s accustomed to competitors in other trades behaving in a more cut-throat manner and was pleased to see bitcoiners join in their advocacy efforts.
It was a sentiment echoed by litigator, former San Bernardino County Deputy District Attorney and industry liaison for the Bitcoin Advocacy Project, Tracy Hoyos-López.
“They’re competitors, but they have so much more in common,” she said of the people who attended the roundtable.
Saturday’s sideline gathering also laid bare some of the lesser-known allies of bitcoin, like rocker Billy Ray Cyrus.
After the photos wrapped, but before Trump came into the room, Cyrus strummed his guitar in the corner and said he wanted to write a song about bitcoin. One attendee suggested a verse of “proof-of-work is where it’s at.” Hoyos-López floated a simpler lyric: “Bitcoin is beautiful.”
“He just looks at me, and he goes, ‘Bitcoin is beautiful, I like that,'” recounted Hoyos-López of the exchange with Cyrus.
Trump tests out his speech
The highlight of Saturday’s ancillary programming, according to multiple people who attended, was the closed-door, industry-wide roundtable with the former president, which lasted almost an hour.
“He walks in knowing he’s a rock star,” Hoyos-López said of Trump’s entrance. “There are rock stars in the room with us, and then all of a sudden, it’s like the real rock star walks into the room.”
Thirty-five gold chairs encircled the table — a deliberate flourish meant to pay homage to bitcoin’s status as digital gold and to Trump’s apparent love of gold, according to one co-organizer of the sit-down. Because the group grew beyond 35 people, extra chairs were added that didn’t match the color scheme.
“It was very low key, very informal, very meet and greet,” said Marathon’s Thiel.
“He was in a very comfortable place, hosting people he knew and liked, and then there were some crypto people mixed in,” continued Thiel.
The former president was flanked by three big voices in the bitcoin community. To Trump’s right sat BTC Inc. CEO David Bailey, who had spent months talking to Trump and his team about bitcoin, and to his left were the Winklevoss brothers.
“I’m very thankful for the President to go out on a limb to do something that is maybe seen as unconventional and support our industry,” Bailey told CNBC. “It makes sense that it would be Donald Trump to do it, because he’s an entrepreneur, he’s a maverick, and he sees opportunities where others don’t.”
Attendees tell CNBC that Trump kicked off the meeting by calling out the names of some of the people he already knew in the room and sharing anecdotes of how they met, or past occasions spent together.
Then, the former president previewed a wide-ranging mix of the talking points of his keynote address at Bitcoin 2024, giving participants of the roundtable the chance to add comments or ask questions.
Topics ran the gamut, including everything from how bitcoin miners could play a role in the country’s energy build-out, to his qualms with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler — both of whom are widely viewed by the crypto community as existential threats to the sector. The former president did not mention Vice President Kamala Harris.
One attendee, Exacore President Chris Cook, was most interested in the conversation around energy.
“Me being a miner at this table, I think it’s really interesting,” Cook told CNBC. “The energy demands of both AI and bitcoin is something he seems to really understand.”
Cook added, “He sees the U.S. doubling the amount of energy production capacity that it currently has to meet this need, and I think he sees the opportunity for a lot of job creation, GDP growth, etc., through that.”
However, unlike the mining roundtable in Mar-a-Lago, Saturday’s sitdown in Nashville was more about Trump sharing his thoughts, rather than soliciting feedback.
“In Mar-a-Lago, what I came away with is that he listened to us. He was listening to the industry to try and figure out what opportunities could exist for the industry to grow and flourish in the U.S.,” said CleanSpark’s Bradford.
“To contrast that with the event in Nashville, my takeaway was that he’s thought about it and formed his ideas about the policy that he would proceed with,” continued the CleanSpark CEO.
Riot’s Les also noted the difference in the former president’s approach to engaging participants this time around. Whereas in Mar-a-Lago, it was more about indoctrinating Trump in all things bitcoin, in Nashville, Les tells CNBC that Trump had already done the work and “had a greater passion about his position around this industry and what he was advocating for.”
“I saw an evolution from one meeting to the next,” said Les.
Having politicians in the room also helped the cause, Les said.
“So it’s not just us in the industry talking up our own book, looking for what we want. We have these members of Congress, former presidential candidates who understand the industry very deeply and are advocating for us. I think that brings a lot of credibility to the discussion,” he said.
Hoyos-López found it refreshing to hear some of their talking points repeated back by the former president.
“He’s reassuring us, he’s like, ‘Hey, I haven’t forgotten what you guys have told me. I promised you I was going to get Elizabeth Warren off your backs, and I intend to see through on that promise,” she said.
To Thiel, the biggest news for the industry was the concept of the government establishing a formal policy to hold onto its bitcoin, because “that would utterly validate it as an asset.” He noted Trump didn’t talk about how the stockpile would work during the roundtable.
“If the U.S. government built a strategic reserve then likely other countries would, and that would pull a whole bunch of bitcoin out of the market,” said Thiel. “That then drives the whole price.”
The president’s bitcoin council
A one-page printed agenda titled “Titans of Industry Presidential Roundtable” was distributed to each of the event’s attendees. It includes three sub-sections: A brief list of discussion topics, a fundraising announcement, and then a single “ask” — “We would like to continue to support you and are asking for an official industry working group to formalize policy feedback.”
Later that day, on stage, the president pledged to do just that when he proposed launching a group dubbed the “bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council.”
“The rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry,” Trump declared that afternoon in the main auditorium as he warmed up the crowd.
Multiple participants of the Bitcoin 2024 fundraisers felt Trump campaign aides left them with the impression that the GOP nominee would form the council from those who attended the Mar-a-Lago miners roundtable and the Nashville crypto industry roundtable.
As Riot’s Les put it, “I think the core message that we communicated to President Trump was, ‘This is your industry leadership group. This is a group that you can turn to when you have questions on policy, when you have questions on the industry. And if elected, in the White House, this is the group that you can turn to to help craft that policy.”
Bradford agreed that the people with a seat at the table had actual knowledge of what’s going on inside the industry — “I think that’s how policy should be built in a country, from the people that are living it every day,” he said.
In the more than half dozen conversations CNBC had with participants, it was clear that after years of feeling sidelined, at best, and personally targeted and persecuted, at worst, industry leaders say they’ve finally been heard. And crucially, that they, a new army of crypto knights, have a higher purpose to serve at future roundtables.
“Everyone understood, ‘Hey, we are here. Like, we — are — here. It’s been how many year’s in the making, and we’re finally all here,'” Hoyos-López said, hopeful.