[Digital Today reporter Jinju Hong] U.S. President Donald Trump put economic achievements and trade policy front and centre in a nearly two-hour joint address to Congress on Feb. 24 local time, in a speech akin to a state of the union. But while he covered a wide range of topics including taxes, artificial intelligence (AI), housing, healthcare and Iran's nuclear issue, he did not mention cryptocurrencies or bitcoin (BTC) even once.

According to major foreign media outlets including blockchain publication The Crypto Basic, Trump described his re-election as "the beginning of a new economic era" and assessed the past year as a period of national revival. He claimed that core inflation fell 1.7 percent over the past three months to the lowest level in five years.

On the housing market, he also stressed that mortgage rates had fallen to the lowest level in four years and that new borrowers' annual costs dropped by about $5,000 from a year earlier. On stocks, he said they had notched 53 record highs since the election and that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had crossed 50,000 faster than expected.

Another key part of the speech was trade policy. Trump said it was "very regrettable" that the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in a way that partially огранич? limited the administration's authority to impose sweeping tariffs. Even so, he stressed he would keep tariffs through other legal routes. He claimed tariffs generated hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and contributed to national security and stronger negotiating power, repeating his long-held view that they could largely replace income taxes.

Markets, however, are also assessing that frequent revisions to tariff policy and legal uncertainty remain a burden.

A notable point was that digital assets were completely left out. Trump has previously vowed to make the United States the "crypto capital of the world", and his family members are also involved in related businesses. But the speech included no mention of policy direction or legislative plans on the sector.

Instead, he devoted a separate section to fostering the AI industry. He also mentioned a plan to have private companies build their own power-generation facilities to respond to rising electricity demand from data centres.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, rose 3 percent to $66,000 after Trump delivered the address. Market participants largely see the rise as tracking a rally in tech stocks and a recovery in risk appetite rather than being directly related to the speech. Another view is that optimism spread during the address with talk that "the economy is roaring", bringing risk-on flows into the broader crypto market.