At a White House summit last week, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spoke passionately about the Trump administration’s plans to embrace cryptocurrencies, a largely unregulated industry that has historically operated on the fringes of finance.
“Technology is at the foundation of the Trump presidency,” Lutnick said, addressing two dozen crypto CEOs. “We’re using the blockchain. We’re using bitcoin. We are going to use digital assets to pound forward, and Donald Trump is leading the way.”
The summit was remarkable in part because of the shift in tone from the White House, which under previous administrations, including Trump 1.0, largely kept crypto companies and their volatile digital tokens sidelined. Suddenly, with President Donald Trump’s re-election, the government is not only open to the industry — it’s actively cheering for it.
But Lutnick’s longtime industry ties have come under scrutiny as he pushes the Trump administration’s pro-crypto priorities, many of which have questionable benefits for anyone besides existing crypto holders.
Among those existing holders is Cantor Fitzgerald, the family-run Wall Street firm Lutnick headed for decades before handing the reins this year to his 27-year-old son, Brandon.
Cantor Fitzgerald is the primary banking partner for Tether, a controversial stablecoin issuer whose token of the same name is by far the most heavily traded digital asset.
The firm also recently acquired a stake — now valued at more than $1.58 billion — in MicroStrategy, the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin on the planet, according to a new report from Accountable.US, a progressive government watchdog group, that was shared exclusively with CNN. Cantor’s crypto holdings also include more than $87 million in iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF.
It’s not clear whether Lutnick personally holds crypto assets.
His 92-page financial disclosure listed holdings in more than 800 entities — all of which he pledged to sell within 90 days of being confirmed, in compliance with conflict-of-interest laws.
It’s not clear what the status of that process is.
The Commerce Department didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Cantor Fitzgerald also didn’t respond to a request for comment.
