Trump Orders U.S. Crypto Policy Reset and Creates Digital Asset Working Group

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 23, 2025, establishing a White House-led process to recast federal policy toward cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and public blockchains. Executive Order 14178 created the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets, set deadlines for agencies to inventory and reconsider existing measures, and ordered the group to propose a federal regulatory framework.

The verified text also prohibited executive agencies, except where required by law, from acting to establish, issue or promote a U.S. central bank digital currency. It revoked Executive Order 14067 of March 9, 2022, and directed Treasury to revoke its July 7, 2022 framework for international engagement on digital assets. Those were immediate policy reversals; the larger regulatory program remained a set of assignments, not completed law.

A whole-of-government reset

The order placed the working group inside the National Economic Council and assigned the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto as chair. Its listed membership included the Treasury secretary, attorney general, commerce and homeland security secretaries, senior White House officials, and the chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Its stated policies favored lawful access to open public blockchain networks, software development, mining and validation, peer-to-peer transactions and self-custody. The order also backed lawful dollar-denominated stablecoins, fair access to banking services and technology-neutral rules with clearer jurisdictional boundaries. These were administration policy declarations. They did not, by themselves, approve a product, dismiss an enforcement case or determine whether any particular token was a security or commodity.

That distinction mattered on January 23. The crypto industry had sought a break from the enforcement-heavy posture of the preceding administration, while legislators and regulators still had unresolved questions about market oversight, consumer protection and the division of authority between agencies. The order gave that policy change an institutional structure, but it preserved powers granted by existing law and made implementation dependent on agencies and, for legislation, Congress.

Deadlines, not a finished framework

Within 30 days, Treasury, Justice, the SEC and other relevant bodies were instructed to identify regulations, guidance, orders and other actions affecting digital assets. Within 60 days, each agency was to recommend whether those items should be rescinded, modified or, where applicable, adopted through regulation.

The working group then had 180 days to submit regulatory and legislative proposals. The required report was to address issuance and operation of digital assets, including stablecoins, with attention to market structure, oversight, consumer protection and risk management.

The same section required an evaluation of a possible national digital asset stockpile, potentially using cryptocurrencies lawfully seized through federal enforcement. It did not establish a stockpile, authorize purchases or specify which assets one might contain. Contemporaneous reporting from Reuters and Axios emphasized that gap, an important limit on claims circulating around the signing.

A parallel custody-accounting change

Also on January 23, 2025, SEC staff issued Staff Accounting Bulletin 122, rescinding the crypto-safeguarding guidance in SAB 121 effective January 30, 2025. SAB 122 instructed entities with safeguarding obligations to assess loss-contingency liability recognition under the applicable U.S. or international accounting standards and to disclose the effects of the accounting change.

SAB 122 was a separate SEC staff action, not a provision of the executive order. Read together, however, the two records showed that the administration’s policy reset was arriving alongside an immediate change sought by custody providers and financial institutions. The day’s consequential development was therefore not a newly created federal crypto reserve or a completed rulebook. It was a documented shift in federal direction, paired with a timetable for turning that direction into agency recommendations and possible legislation.