Trump Heads to Beijing for High-Stakes Xi Summit: What It Means for Bitcoin

US President Donald Trump is set to meet his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing from May 13 to 15.

The visit, which will be Trump’s first return to China since 2017, will reportedly touch on issues such as AI, semiconductors, new trades and investments, as well as Middle East tensions, but for Bitcoin (BTC) and digital asset markets, it also carries some implications.

The Crypto Angle

Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese imports in his first term and did the same when he came back to the Oval Office in 2025, creating pressure for Chinese mining equipment manufacturers such as Bitmain, Canaan, and MicroBT.

The trade tensions also led to a constant see-sawing in BTC’s price, with the flagship cryptocurrency reacting negatively to almost all the threats Trump made to China and several other countries.

With all eyes on the upcoming Trump-Xi summit, many in the crypto space are hoping it could lead to China softening its stance on BTC and digital assets in general. There are indeed crypto undertones to the meeting, with several of the 17 executives traveling with the US president having meaningful digital asset exposure.

For instance, the CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, manages the largest spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund; meanwhile, Tesla, represented by Elon Musk, owns 11,509 BTC.

Visa’s Ryan McInerney and Mastercard’s Michael Miebach are both scaling stablecoin settlement infrastructure, while David Solomon, whose Goldman Sachs recently expanded its crypto trading operations, also made the cut. If the summit eases US-China financial flows, those institutions stand to benefit, and markets would likely price that in quickly.

However, according to a May 12 analysis from XWIN Japan, the hopes that the Chinese government may rethink its crypto policy are misguided, considering Chinese authorities recently reinforced restrictions on crypto-related activities, real-world asset tokenization, and yuan-linked stablecoins.

As such, direct expansion of mainland Chinese Bitcoin demand remains off the table for now.

How It Could Move Bitcoin Mining

Another sector that could profit from this meeting includes the Bitcoin mining supply chains, which, although North America dominates in terms of global hashrate growth, are still supplied to a great extent by China.

Were the meeting to result in the easing of tensions, it could speed up mining investments and hashrate expansion, which could positively affect the price of BTC. On the other hand, a breakdown would possibly put more pressure on equipment costs and create supply delays for miners globally, hitting Bitcoin in ways that go beyond simple sentiment shifts.

At the time of writing, BTC was trading near $81,000, having gained less than 1% in the last seven days, per data from CoinGecko. However, the 30-day picture was much better, as the cryptocurrency was up around 13% in that period.

Meanwhile, the macro background heading into the summit is not clean, with oil prices going up by as much as 4% to $105.50 on Monday after US-Iran peace talks stalled. Higher oil feeds inflation expectations, which in turn reduce the probability of Federal Reserve rate cuts, tightening financial conditions for risk assets, including Bitcoin.

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