Just over a year ago, while sitting around a table in an ornate meeting room at Mar-a-Lago, David Bailey and a group of top Bitcoin executives made a pitch to Donald J. Trump.

They were looking for a savior.

For years, cryptocurrency companies had endured a sweeping crackdown in Washington — a cascade of lawsuits, regulatory attacks and prosecutions that threatened the industry’s survival.

Mr. Trump wasn’t an obvious sympathizer. He had once dismissed Bitcoin as a “scam.” But he welcomed the executives into his private club in Florida because the industry had suddenly gotten his attention. Mr. Bailey was mobilizing crypto investors to vote for Mr. Trump and had called on his colleagues to raise $100 million for the election effort.

At Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Bailey brought along representatives of several large Bitcoin mining firms — an energy-guzzling sector that has drawn noise complaints and environmental concerns. They pitched Mr. Trump on the economic benefits of Bitcoin, before pivoting to a bold request: Could Mr. Trump write a supportive post on his social media site?

The proposed language was included at the bottom of a bullet-pointed meeting agenda, according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Trump said he would “consider it,” Mr. Bailey, who runs the digital currency firm BTC Inc., recalled in an interview. “We had no idea if that was going to happen.”

That night, Mr. Trump fired off a Truth Social post containing the exact message proposed by the executives: “We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”

The post was one of the earliest successes in a high-stakes lobbying campaign by the crypto industry that has put huge sums of money behind Mr. Trump and reaped enormous rewards.

Since Mr. Trump’s election, the price of Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency, has skyrocketed to over $100,000, enriching executives who supported his campaign. Crypto advocates who were shunned in Washington during the Biden administration now enjoy astonishing access to the Trump White House, which has quickly unwound the regulatory crackdown. And the federal government has embraced sweeping pro-crypto policies that could upend the U.S. financial system for decades.

All of that resulted from one of the great lobbying free-for-alls in recent history. For months, industry executives, paid lobbyists, campaign operatives, and Trump business partners and family members orchestrated a diffuse but stunningly effective influence operation that turned Mr. Trump from an outspoken Bitcoin skeptic into crypto’s most important supporter.

Virtually every step of Mr. Trump’s transformation has been steered by the industry. Lacking much knowledge of its intricacies, Mr. Trump embraced crypto when he saw it could generate huge profits for himself or his political groups, while outsourcing the details to industry advisers with their own business ambitions, according to documents and audio recordings, as well as interviews with more than 50 people involved in Mr. Trump’s crypto plans.

Now he is deeply enmeshed in an industry his administration regulates — one that was founded as a renegade alternative to the big banks. He and his sons unveiled their own crypto business last fall, the start of a blitz of new ventures that has grown to include four Trump-branded digital currencies and even a Bitcoin mining company.

At some points, the only meaningful check on the industry’s power has come from rival crypto interests jockeying against one another to influence Mr. Trump. The competition has at times resembled a bidding war.

Just this spring, crypto investors around the world spent almost $200 million on a digital token called a memecoin marketed by Mr. Trump, vying for the chance to bend the president’s ear at a dinner. Crypto interests also donated about $18 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee and millions more to his political groups, while spending over $130 million to support congressional candidates who backed the industry.

The influence operation, while legal, is striking even by the standards of Washington, combining the personal enrichment of a president with tactics long deployed by corporate lobbyists.

“None of that compares to what I’m seeing now,” Representative Maxine Waters of California, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview. “It’s off the scale with the amount of money.”

In a statement, Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the Trump administration was “fulfilling the president’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the planet by driving innovation and economic opportunity.”

Many of Mr. Trump’s allies stressed that he has always been open to hearing points of view — but ultimately makes the important decisions himself.

“No one convinces Trump of anything but Trump,” Mr. Bailey said.

‘Modern Art or Whatever’

Crypto enthusiasts have a term for the conversion of a Bitcoin skeptic into a believer. They call it “orange pilling,” a reference to Bitcoin’s signature color and to a plotline from the 1999 movie “The Matrix.”

Mr. Trump was a prime target.

In the past, he had called crypto “not money” and “based on thin air.” But the president’s views on many topics are famously flexible. Crypto supporters just needed the right message and the right messengers.

Mr. Trump began to soften on crypto after he was approached by a longtime business partner, Bill Zanker.

In the 1980s, Mr. Zanker founded a for-profit education company, the Learning Annex, that offered presentations from celebrities, including Mr. Trump, on how to succeed in life and business. Mr. Zanker later wrote a book with Mr. Trump and went on to dabble in a range of other ventures, including selling back rubs and fitness equipment.

By 2022, Mr. Zanker had reinvented himself as a crypto entrepreneur, and he pitched Mr. Trump on a series of nonfungible tokens — collectible digital images built on the same technology as crypto, like baseball cards for the internet era. Each image featured a cartoon likeness of Mr. Trump, costumed as an astronaut, a cowboy or a superhero. Mr. Zanker told him that the NFTs could generate as much as $100 million.

The NFTs went on sale in December 2022, marketed as Trump Digital Trading Cards, and sold out almost immediately. (Mr. Trump received more than $7 million from NFT sales, according to a financial disclosure filed last year, which covered 2023 and the first few months of 2024.)

About a year after the initial sale, in November 2023, crypto enthusiasts who had bought the NFTs were invited to Mar-a-Lago to meet Mr. Trump. It was a crucial moment in Mr. Trump’s conversion, one of the first times he championed crypto investments to a crowd of supporters.

Addressing his guests, the former president seemed unsure how to describe the peculiar new financial product he was hawking — “modern art or whatever,” he said, according to a recording obtained by The Times. But he was confident that he had made a lot of money from the images, which went on sale for $99 each.

“They sold out in less than a day,” Mr. Trump said. “I could have done $199, $299, $399, $499.”

In early May 2024, Mr. Trump hosted another event at Mar-a-Lago for the NFT holders, just as the presidential campaign was heating up. During a freewheeling Q&A, one of the guests asked Mr. Trump whether supporters could donate to the campaign in digital currencies, according to a recording obtained by The Times.

Mr. Trump sounded uncertain even as he made a pledge.

“If you can’t,” he replied, “I’ll make sure you can.”

About two weeks later, the Trump campaign made the policy official. It would accept crypto.

Courtship of a Candidate

The crypto industry needed the next president to do more than simply take its money. Top executives were in the market for a political champion.

Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Securities and Exchange Commission had filed lawsuits against an array of major crypto companies, setting up years of court fights. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, had rallied an influential group of lawmakers who argued that crypto was fundamentally dangerous to the economy. Industry entreaties to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign had largely failed.

So in early 2024, a small group of crypto executives embarked on a courtship of Mr. Trump.

Among the leaders in that effort was Mr. Bailey, who organizes one of the industry’s largest corporate conferences. He worked closely with Tracy Hoyos-López, a Bitcoin advocate and former prosecutor who had a valuable personal connection: Her father was friends with Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman.

Mr. Manafort helped pave the way for an introductory meeting between Mr. Bailey and Mr. Trump at Trump Tower in May 2024.

“Paul saw a political opportunity,” Mr. Bailey said. “He’s a very pro-Bitcoin guy.”

At the time, Mr. Trump was in the middle of his Manhattan criminal trial, a case involving illegal campaign donations, and he arrived at Trump Tower after a long day in court.

Mr. Bailey was joined there by three other crypto advocates. They argued that crypto investors could become a significant voting bloc, on par with supporters of the gun industry. And they pointed out that Ms. Warren was one of their industry’s main antagonists.

At one point, Mr. Bailey said, he presented a chart showing how much Bitcoin’s price had risen during Mr. Trump’s first term. He called it “the Trump Pump.”

Mr. Trump repeated the phrase with delight, Mr. Bailey recalled.

Five days later, Mr. Trump gave a speech at the Libertarian Party’s nominating convention, where he promised to “stop Joe Biden’s crusade to crush crypto” and “keep Elizabeth Warren and her goons away from your Bitcoin.”

Soon millions of dollars in crypto money started flowing into the Trump campaign.

The founders of Kraken and Gemini, crypto exchanges that had been sued by the S.E.C., each donated more than $1 million to groups backing Mr. Trump. In June, the venture capital investor David Sacks held a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump at his home in San Francisco, where the candidate dined with a group of executives, including a top lawyer at Coinbase, the largest U.S. exchange and another S.E.C. target.

Mr. Bailey was also rallying support. He arranged for the Bitcoin mining executives to visit Mar-a-Lago in June and raised $30 million to support Mr. Trump’s election effort, he said.

Crucially, he also secured the candidate as the keynote speaker at the annual Bitcoin conference in Nashville. The event, organized by Mr. Bailey’s company, promised to bring together tens of thousands of crypto enthusiasts — a tantalizing pool of potential supporters.

Two weeks before the speech, Mr. Trump was shot in the ear during an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa. Undaunted, he honored his commitment to the Bitcoin faithful.

“He made sure to have his team call us and let us know that it didn’t matter — come hell or high water, he was coming to the conference,” Ms. Hoyos-López said on a crypto podcast this year.

As the conference approached, Mr. Bailey learned that Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican and longtime crypto booster, was planning to introduce a bill calling for the establishment of a national Bitcoin reserve, a kind of Fort Knox for the digital age.

Mr. Bailey was intrigued. A federal reserve would give a government imprimatur to an industry long snubbed in Washington, elevating Bitcoin to the level of strategic assets like gold and petroleum. He asked the Trump campaign to endorse the proposal.

Again, Mr. Trump delivered.

In front of thousands of cheering supporters in Nashville, he promised to create a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile.”

“I will be the pro-innovation and pro-Bitcoin president that America needs,” Mr. Trump declared.

An Invitation Rescinded

If the orange-pilling of Mr. Trump began as a behind-the-scenes influence campaign, operating on the margins of the presidential race, it became a public spectacle after his victory in November.

Within a month of the election, Mr. Trump chose Mr. Sacks as his “A.I. and Crypto Czar,” in charge of managing the administration’s technology policy.

But virtually everyone in the crypto world was jockeying for direct access to the White House. Crypto businesses and their executives spent $9.9 million on lobbyists in the first three months of 2025.

Days after Mr. Trump’s swearing-in, Coinbase, which had donated $1 million to the inaugural fund, announced that it was appointing Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign official, to its global advisory council. Mr. Manafort, who was convicted in 2018 on criminal charges related to his foreign lobbying and later pardoned by Mr. Trump, began advising crypto interests on how to navigate the president’s orbit, said three people familiar with the industry.

Arguably the most aggressive Trump courtier was Ripple, a crypto company that offers cross-border payments and had battled in court with the S.E.C. for years.

In January, Ripple donated nearly $5 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee — the second-largest contribution.

Over the first three months of 2025, Ripple spent another $400,000 on lobbying, most of which went to two firms with close ties to Mr. Trump: Ballard Partners, run by a major Trump fund-raiser, Brian Ballard; and Michael Best Strategies, whose board of advisers includes Mr. LaCivita and Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff.

Days after the inaugural fund donation, Ripple’s chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse, attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with the president-elect. Mr. Garlinghouse brought along Ripple’s chief legal officer. Joining them were Meredith O’Rourke, who raised money for Mr. Trump’s groups; Bridget G. Nocco, a veteran fund-raising consultant for Ballard Partners; and Mr. Priebus.

In an interview in January, Mr. Garlinghouse told The Times that he had encouraged Mr. Trump and his advisers to expand the Bitcoin reserve proposal originally introduced in Nashville. He wanted the United States to stockpile other types of cryptocurrencies — including XRP, Ripple’s signature coin.

Ripple executives trumpeted their dinner with Mr. Trump on social media, posting a photo with the president-elect. “The beef bourguignon was really good,” wrote Stuart Alderoty, Ripple’s chief legal officer.

Some industry colleagues bristled.

Charles Hoskinson, a prominent crypto executive, poked fun at the Ripple executives. He wrote on social media that they had “paid 5 million for their dinner with Trump,” a reference to Ripple’s whopping contribution to the inaugural committee.

Mr. Hoskinson had his own policy agenda. His firm, Input Output Global, had donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee, and he was eager to shape crypto legislation on Capitol Hill.

After the inauguration, Mr. Hoskinson paid $1 million to a Trump-aligned PAC to attend a separate fund-raising dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

But while he was in the air en route to the March 1 event, he got some surprising news. His invitation had been rescinded. A problem had come up during his Secret Service background check, he was told.

Mr. Hoskinson received a refund. But he is still waiting for a full account of what happened, he said in an interview.

A possible explanation came from Ms. O’Rourke, who organized the dinner, Mr. Hoskinson said. She told his staff that the issue may have been the message he had posted about Ripple.

‘I Made the Promise’

The dinner became a golden opportunity for Ripple.

Among the attendees were some of the same people who had dined on beef bourguignon with Mr. Trump in January, including Mr. Alderoty of Ripple and Ms. Nocco, the Ballard consultant.

A frequent presence at Trump fund-raising events, Ms. Nocco is married to a well-connected county sheriff in Florida and has enjoyed a cordial relationship with Mr. Trump, who refers to her affectionately as “the sheriff’s wife.”

At some point that evening in March, Ms. Nocco appealed to the president to include Ripple’s XRP in the stockpile, pointing out that the company had been generous to him, according to six people who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Mr. Trump heeded her request.

The morning after the dinner, he wrote on Truth Social that he had directed a presidential working group “to move forward on a Crypto Strategic Reserve” that would include XRP, as well as two other digital currencies — one linked to Mr. Hoskinson’s firm, despite his canceled invitation, and another associated with Solana Labs.

The announcement came as a shock to much of the crypto industry. The coins Mr. Trump had listed were not considered on par with Bitcoin. It would be the equivalent of putting a stack of copper pennies alongside the solid gold bars in Fort Knox.

Mr. Hoskinson and a co-founder of Solana Labs soon distanced themselves from the idea. A spokeswoman for Ripple did not respond to requests for comment.

Almost immediately, Mr. Trump was besieged by allies and advisers, who told him that he had been manipulated by the consultant working for Mr. Ballard on the Ripple account, said four people familiar with the discussions. The price of Ripple’s XRP surged 33 percent — a fact the president’s aides pointed out to him. (Some details of the episode were reported earlier by Politico.)

Amid the behind-the-scenes backlash, Mr. Sacks, the crypto czar, posted on X that Mr. Trump was planning a reserve containing “Bitcoin and other top cryptocurrencies,” consistent with his campaign promises.

Three minutes later, Mr. Trump wrote an addendum to his original post, expanding the list of coins to include Bitcoin as well as Ethereum, the second-most-valuable digital currency.

“I also love Bitcoin and Ethereum!” he wrote.

The update had an immediate beneficiary: his family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial. It had recently bought a large stash of Ethereum, which rose in value by $33 million after the president’s announcement.

Still, Mr. Trump felt burned by the experience and told aides that he did not want Mr. Ballard or his team at any more of his fund-raisers, two of the people said. Mr. Ballard later met with Mr. Trump at the White House to smooth things over, and has been spotted at events with Mr. Trump since.

Ultimately, the stockpile plan took a modest form.

On March 6, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that established a federal reserve containing Bitcoin that the government had already obtained in legal seizures, with a promise to consider acquiring more in the future.

Mr. Trump reviewed the documentation in the Oval Office, with Mr. Sacks at his side.

“This is something you believe in fully?” the president asked.

“One hundred percent,” Mr. Sacks replied.

“And I made the promise, right?” Mr. Trump asked again.

“Absolutely,” Mr. Sacks told him.

Mr. Trump signed the order.

Maggie Haberman and Andrea Fuller contributed reporting.