The wheels are already beginning to turn on Donald Trump’s plan to make the US into the “crypto capital of the planet” following his return to the White House.
In an executive order signed Thursday, Trump established a “working group on digital asset markets,” which will be responsible for weighing the possibility of the US forming a “strategic national digital asset stockpile,” among other things.
The promise to establish a stockpile was one of numerous commitments made by Trump to the crypto industry before he was reelected. Though the idea stumped economists, it received a rapturous reception among bitcoiners. As rumors of an impending announcement spread Thursday, the price of bitcoin climbed to $105,000 per coin, just short of the record high.
The order also requires the working group—which will comprise the leaders of various government branches, financial regulatory bodies, and the attorney general—to come up with an appropriate set of regulations and laws governing the use of crypto.
Earlier in the week, on Trump’s second day in office, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) —the US regulatory body that brought a volley of lawsuits against crypto firms under the Joe Biden administration—established a “crypto task force.” Under new leadership following the departure of former chair Gary Gensler, who was widely demonized in the cryptosphere, the SEC will develop a “comprehensive and clear regulatory framework for crypto assets,” the agency stated.
Later the same day, Trump granted clemency to Ross Ulbricht, who was serving life in prison for crimes committed while running the infamous darknet marketplace Silk Road, one of the first websites to accept bitcoin as payment. After being arrested in 2013, Ulbricht became something of a martyr in crypto circles for his part in spreading the bitcoin gospel.
These initial gestures signal Trump’s willingness to follow through on earlier campaign promises: to pass various crypto-related legislation, reform the financial regulatory apparatus in the US, and knit crypto into the US national treasury. The effects will be extensive, crypto figures believe, reverberating far beyond US shores and creating the conditions for a new golden era for the industry.
“Our technology is very powerful and transformative. We need to land it in different societies,” says Joseph Lubin, cofounder of Ethereum and chief executive at software company Consensys. “And America is a standard-setter for the rest of the world.”
Despite having previously spurned bitcoin as a “scam,” Trump now has extensive ties to the crypto industry, many high-profile members of which came out in support of his reelection campaign.
In the lead-up to the 2024 election, crypto organizations donated hundreds of millions of dollars to crypto-focused super political action committees, which spent the funds in support of crypto-friendly congressional candidates, many of them Republican.
On the campaign trail, Trump began to bill himself as the first “crypto president.” In July, in front of a rabid crowd of bitcoiners, Trump promised to turn the US into a crypto mining powerhouse and establish a national bitcoin stockpile if reelected. In the same speech, he pledged to fire Gensler, the SEC chair, prompting the most rapturous applause of the night.
In September, apparently dissatisfied with watching from the dugout, Trump and his family helped to launch a new crypto business, World Liberty Financial, which they pitched as a way to “make finance great again.”
Days before his inauguration, on January 17, Trump even launched his own official memecoin—a highly volatile type of cryptocurrency whose price is dictated by the amount of attention it attracts—sparking a trading frenzy. Two companies with connections to Trump own 80 percent of the total supply of the coin, a trove theoretically valued in the tens of billions of dollars.
Now that Trump has skin in the game, the crypto industry can be all the more confident of his continued support, says Demelza Hays, digital asset portfolio manager at investment firm Zeltner & Co and chief economist at crypto trade publication CoinTelegraph. “This was definitely saying that Trump is going to support crypto, profit from crypto, and try to remove any barriers to crypto,” says Hays. “All of a sudden, we have the president coming out and saying: ‘F you, I’m launching a memecoin.’”
After Trump emerged victorious in November, the crypto industry worked closely with the transition team, WIRED reported, to select a new chair for the SEC, who would be tasked with creating a regulatory framework for crypto. Trump settled on crypto advocate and former SEC commissioner Paul Atkins, who awaits confirmation.
The priority among crypto businesses is the ability to operate in the US without the fear of legal action by the SEC, which under Gensler took the view that many crypto businesses were violating securities laws, but declined to outline rules for the industry. “We’ve been operating under a cloud of regulatory uncertainty for a really long time,” says Lubin.
In the absence of clear rules, “the problem is that people end up trying to read the tea leaves,” said SEC commissioner Hester Peirce, who will lead the SEC’s new crypto task force, in an interview with WIRED last year. “A good way to handle this is not to bring a bunch of enforcement cases and [ask the industry] to connect all the dots.”
The new set of rules will liberate crypto entrepreneurs to press the limits of the technology, claims Noelle Acheson, a market analyst formerly of crypto brokerage Genesis. “The big impact will be all the building that has been on pause because of the SEC’s approach in the last four years,” she says. “We are now in a period of accelerated change—change on steroids.”
The initial offerings made to the crypto industry by Trump in the early days of his presidency, says Acheson, are but “a taste of what’s coming.”