The question the crypto industry has been asking Washington for a decade is a simple one: who is in charge? President Trump gathered the industry’s executives at the White House on Wednesday to say an answer is close.

Trump spoke alongside technology leaders in the Roosevelt Room, with executives from Coinbase, Ripple and Nasdaq in attendance, along with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig. Leaders from Gemini and Chainlink Labs were there as well, and Ripple was represented by chief executive Brad Garlinghouse.

“We’re leading in every aspect, including AI, and we’re leading by a lot,” Trump said.

The gathering was timed to the first meeting of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Advisory Committee, which convenes Thursday in Washington, D.C., to advise the agency on digital assets, artificial intelligence and prediction markets.

The substance is a jurisdictional fight that sounds technical and is not. Under current law, a digital token can be treated as a security, which puts it under the Securities and Exchange Commission, or as a commodity, which puts it under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Nobody agrees which is which. That ambiguity is why some exchanges will not list certain tokens, why banks have been cautious about custody, and why several firms moved operations offshore.

Trump used the event to push the Senate on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the bill that would draw the dividing line, calling for a fair version of the measure and arguing it would keep the United States ahead of China. A Senate vote is expected September 15.

Regulators are not waiting. The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rules Tuesday that would exempt certain token offerings from securities regulation, addressing a longstanding industry complaint that the existing rules were unclear and costly to comply with.

For an ordinary customer, the practical effect of a settled rulebook is mundane and real: clearer disclosure requirements before buying a token, a defined agency to complain to when something goes wrong, and a legal footing for banks and brokerages to hold digital assets the way they hold everything else.

The event drew scrutiny for a reason the White House has faced before. Trump has earned more than $1 billion from the crypto industry since returning to office, including over $635 million from a licensing agreement tied to the $TRUMP meme coin and $236 million from the sale of tokens through World Liberty Financial, a firm he founded in 2024 with Steve Witkoff, now a White House special envoy, and their sons. The president has said he has no day-to-day role in his family’s business and that his investments are independently managed, and the White House has rejected allegations of impropriety. Polling shows a majority of Americans believe he has profited inappropriately from those ventures.

That argument will not be resolved this month. The rulebook might be. The Senate vote in September is the piece that decides whether a decade of regulatory confusion actually ends, or whether the industry spends another year waiting to find out which agency it answers to.

JBizNews Desk | Washington, D.C.

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