Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C., ballroom

In the ballroom of the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C., on Thursday night, 220 cryptocurrency VIPs were waiting for their dinner with the president.

About 220 cryptocurrency VIPs were waiting for their dinner with President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C., on Thursday night.

Seated ten to a table, they were treated to the “Trump Organic Field Green Salad” — cucumber, carrot, pickled red onion, and cherry tomato under a honey vinaigrette — followed by pucks of filet mignon and halibut. On the side, they were served a dollop of mashed potatoes and what sure looked like frozen vegetables. The dress code was black tie, though some opted for bitcoin-orange bow ties. One attendee estimates that there were “five to eight” women.

“The food was not important,” attendee Sangrok Oh explains.

The 215-odd men and five-to-eight women were there thanks to a rare opportunity — to purchase face-time with the president. In April, Trump announced a sweepstakes for the top buyers of $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched on his inauguration weekend that has no inherent value or utility. Oh, a crypto-firm founder from South Korea eked his way into the top 25, earning a private reception before the meal and a White House tour on Friday. “It’s kind of a fundraiser,” Oh said in a separate interview with the New York Times.

Concerns from protesters outside that crypto millionaires were lobbying the president may have been overstated. Trump landed in the Marine One helicopter around 6:55 p.m., when he had a brief meeting with the top-25 diners. In a back room, Oh says that Trump expressed a “clear intention to support people in the crypto industry.” Then the president came out to address the main crowd, promising more support to the sector that has inflated his personal net worth by hundreds of millions over the past year.

“Then he started joking around — ‘What a beautiful place, I wonder who owns it,’” says Vincent Liu, the chief operating officer at the Taiwan-based firm Kronos Research, who was also in attendance.

After 15-to-20 minutes — a short window for the long-winded president — Trump was done. As diners tucked into their meals, they heard the helicopter taking off back to the White House. The contest that promised “Dinner With President Trump” didn’t even include a dinner with President Trump.

Some complained to the crypto journalist Coffeezilla that the dinner was disappointing and the speech was “wack.” But Liu thought it was “very much worth it” to be in the room with the pro-crypto president and network with other industry leaders. Oh said that “meeting with other CEOs” was the most important part.

Among those in the crowd were Justin Sun, the billionaire who has benefited greatly from Trump’s lax crypto enforcement — and has invested almost $100 million in Trump’s assorted crypto properties. Lamar Odom, the former Los Angeles Laker, was there as a crypto convert pumping his own coin, $ODOM.

Protesters outside concerned with Trump benefiting off the presidency had a point: The meme coin alone has earned Trump’s businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in fees alone. And the dinner was certainly lucrative. A crypto intelligence firm told Reuters that the top 220 investors in total spent $148 million, which raked in more fees for Trump and provided a temporary boost to the coin’s value. But there were some who got in there for a steal.

Morten Christensen is a 39-year-old Dutch national living in Mexico City who runs a company that connects users to free cryptocurrency giveaways. As the contest wore on, Christensen and his friends used a basic risk-management strategy to buy enough $TRUMP in order to get in the room without investing heavily in the coin.

Their strategy is called a delta-neutral play. Christensen says he bought $50,000 worth of the coin while hedging it for the same amount on a separate exchange in order to reap the rewards without being exposed to any of the risk. “We do this every day on much deeper levels,” he says. He adds that he and five friends managed to get into the dinner spending around $1,200 each in fees.

After meeting Odom and Sun, Christensen began talking to other investors at the dinner. Of roughly 40 people he chatted with, he says, “Most people I spoke to had hedge positions” — suggesting all might not be what it seems on the $TRUMP leaderboard.

After mingling, Christensen did not head to the after-party. “My friends did, and they weren’t very impressed.” He had gotten what he came for. “When this opportunity pops up and you figure out a way to do it risk free? Yeah, I’ll take that opportunity for sure.” But the bonus he hoped for did not work out. “Me and my friends were hoping that he would slip something that we could trade on.”