US President Donald Trump has no cryptocurrency policy. He did not negotiate legislation or develop regulatory guidance. But without sweeping demands from the White House and pressure he exerted on political allies in Congress, it’s hard to imagine the industry achieving several of the major successes he celebrated in his first year in office.
This feature is part of CoinDesk The Most Influential List of 2025.
Between his first and second administrations, Trump shockingly reversed course on his early skepticism about digital assets, not only jumping on the industry’s train but demanding to be its new conductor. The president, whose Securities and Exchange Commission (then led by former Chairman Jay Clayton) sued Ripple, effectively kick-starting a regulatory and enforcement approach to the industry, ushered in his second term on a series of pro-crypto campaign promises.
Trump has largely delivered on those promises, signing multiple executive orders, setting an agenda for his regulators and Congress, and appointing regulators who put pro-crypto policy efforts high on their priority list. The president says he will make the United States a global leader in cryptocurrencies, with his digital assets team promising a “golden age” for cryptocurrencies. Trump ordered the creation of a comprehensive U.S. regulatory regime for digital asset activities and stablecoin issuers. He also called for the creation of two cryptocurrency reserves as long-term federal investments, the first such “strategic reserve” in Bitcoin and the second among all other tokens.
So far, this ambitious agenda has not been completed.
When Congress managed to get the stablecoin bill through the once recalcitrant Senate, there was a huge celebration at the White House, with Trump asking the House to sign the bill without additional changes. The Stablecoin Guidance and Establishing National Innovation in the United States (GENIUS) Act became the law of the land, and the president chatted at a gathering of top cryptocurrency CEOs and cabinet members.
It’s clearly an appetizer before the main course: The bill would clearly define how digital assets are defined and how the federal government oversees transactions with them.
This is where Trump’s efforts fall short. While his allies managed to bring a market structure bill to the House floor, where it garnered unusual bipartisan support, the bill stalled in the Senate. Despite Trump’s ambitious summer deadlines, legislation has often stalled in the Senate. There are many reasons for this, including its time limit on speaking time, the fact that it typically requires a 60-vote, bipartisan majority to move anything forward, and the greater ability of single members to intervene in work. It didn’t help that Congress failed to act on the budget during legislative negotiations, leading to the federal government closing its doors for weeks.
There are some significant complaints and concerns among Democrats in the draft bill released by the Banking Committee and Agriculture Committee. Much of their attention is focused on consumer protection and preventing bad actors from abusing technology. But the most political and controversial pushback centers on the president himself.
When Trump changed his mind on cryptocurrencies, he invested his entire wallet. He began to personally profit from non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that he played in various heroic scenarios. He and his family have steadily branched out into just about every other part of the cryptocurrency and blockchain world, holding stakes in World Liberty Financial, the Trump-themed memecoin launched before he took office, the family’s push for cryptocurrency mining and, most recently, the Trump Media Technology Group’s move into prediction markets. The most obvious manifestation of the fusion of public and private advantages is World Liberty Financial, a Trump-branded cryptocurrency venture that raised more than $550 million for its WLFI governance token through a KYC token sale even before he returned to the White House.
Public disclosures later revealed that Trump family members controlled approximately 22.5 billion WLFI, with their stake worth approximately $5 billion when the token began trading this fall, or about $0.23. Since then, the project has attempted to evolve from a memecoin with a MAGA aesthetic into a serious DeFi and payments play, using WLFI as the political governance layer for its $1 stablecoin and an upcoming series of “real world asset” products.
Around WLFI, a complete Trumpcoin complex has formed. The $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins have spent much of 2024 experiencing wild swings at every campaign rally, policy headline, and late night TV monologue, briefly outperforming most of the altcoin market before giving back most of their gains.
In June, Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, said that World Liberty Financial would take a stake in the TRUMP token itself, effectively tying the family’s flagship protocol to the most speculative corners of its own memetic ecosystem and inviting comparisons to the FTX/Alameda cycle.
Trump has barely traveled the cryptocurrency path, reportedly making hundreds of millions of dollars from digital asset investments. Since he also directs the government’s cryptocurrency policy, congressional Democrats strongly objected to this apparent conflict of interest.
At a Dec. 2 House hearing on bank regulation, Trump appointees said they agreed with rules that bar regulators and Fed board members from participating in bank ownership or management to avoid conflicts. But when asked whether the same standards governing cryptocurrency policy should be aimed at when the president has financial ties to the industry, they declined to answer.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee issued a report declaring that the situation represents a “new era of corruption.”
White House spokesperson Carolyn Levitt denied that Trump or his family had any conflict of interest involving cryptocurrency. “Through executive actions, support for legislation like the Genius Act, and other common-sense policies, the administration is delivering on the president’s promise to make the United States the cryptocurrency capital of the world by driving innovation and providing economic opportunity for all Americans,” she told CoinDesk in a statement.
However, the action that may have the most immediate impact on the cryptocurrency industry is Trump’s appointment. Before this year, the industry generally viewed former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler as the administration’s chief enemy. Gensler’s SEC has declined to create tailor-made cryptocurrency regulations, instead directing the industry through a series of enforcement actions and court proceedings. But Trump’s successor, Paul Atkins, launched the “Cryptocurrency Project” and called its efforts — including policies around the tokenization of securities — his top priority.
Trump has appointed regulators at financial institutions eager to meet the demands of his cryptocurrency order. Their initiatives, such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s push to create regulated platforms to offer leveraged spot crypto products, were already in the works long before any future market structure bills were introduced in Congress.
“To realize President Trump’s vision of making the United States the cryptocurrency capital of the world, the SEC must fully consider the potential benefits and risks of moving our markets from an off-chain to an on-chain environment,” Atkins said in a speech introducing the cryptocurrency project. “President Trump has said that America is in a golden age — and with our new agenda, so will our crypto-asset economy,” he said.
