FRANCE – 2025/01/20: On this photo illustration, Trump Meme , Trump the Crypto president, is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Romain Doucelin/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Romain Doucelin | Getty Images
Crypto executives, corporations and investors are getting an early return on their investment in Donald Trump.
After pouring tens of thousands and thousands of dollars into Trump’s 2024 campaign for president, the crypto industry has been paid back handsomely during his first week within the White House.
“I do not think they might have imagined a greater end result than they only got prior to now 48 hours,” Benchmark’s Bill Gurley, known for an early bet on Uber, told CNBC’s “Closing Bell” on Friday. Gurley said that while tech’s newfound influence in Washington could also be harmful to some parts of the startup world, “it’s obviously good for crypto.”
The industry’s support for Trump was built on the Republican leader’s promise to stop the federal government’s crackdown on crypto and implement regulations favorable to those that desired to develop recent forms of payment technologies while easing restrictions on investments in cryptocurrencies.
Industry heavyweights like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Binance CEO Richard Teng are lauding the beginning of a recent era.
“You could have to recollect, the last 4 years, we actually felt like we were being attacked by this administration,” Armstrong told CNBC on the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Armstrong criticized the Biden White House for attempting to “weaponize the dearth of clarity in the principles,” punishing even the businesses that were attempting to be helpful.
“There have been some bad actors too, to be fair,” Armstrong said. “But they even really tried to go after the great actors, I believe, like us.” Coinbase was considered one of the leading corporate donors within the 2024 election cycle.
Bitcoin hit a record high of around $109,000 on Monday and hovered near $105,000 by the top of the week. It’s up greater than 50% since Trump’s election victory in early November.
Trump’s crypto executive order
U.S. President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order on cryptocurrencies within the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Jan. 23, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The 48-hour stretch referenced by Gurley included an executive order signed by Trump on Thursday to advertise digital asset adoption within the U.S.
Trump called on members of Treasury, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to hitch forces in a working group to guage the potential of stockpiling cryptocurrencies seized by the federal government.
The order outlined other key priorities, corresponding to protecting bitcoin miners and software developers from what the president called “persecution,” and promoting U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins, while banning a digital dollar from the Federal Reserve.
Enterprise capitalist David Sacks, who Trump tapped to be the White House AI and crypto czar, joined the president within the Oval Office for the signing of the order.
In a while Thursday, the SEC made a landmark announcement, withdrawing an accounting rule that made institutional crypto adoption harder by forcing banks to treat bitcoin and other tokens as a liability on their balance sheet.
The rule, often called SAB 121, was introduced in 2022 and subjected digital assets to strict capital requirements. It also raised the financial and regulatory risks of offering crypto custody services and boosted operational costs for financial institutions.
Efforts to overturn SAB 121 gained bipartisan support in Congress last 12 months. But then-President Biden vetoed the proposed laws, leaving the rule intact, further discouraging banks from adopting digital assets beyond derivatives trading and offering exchange-traded funds to wealth management clients.
The move was celebrated by SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who on Tuesday was tapped to guide a recent “crypto task force” inside the agency.
“Bye, bye SAB 121! It is not been fun,” she wrote in a post on X.
Before the SEC’s announcement, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told CNBC in Davos that from a regulatory perspective, the bank couldn’t own bitcoin and that it might revisit the problem if the principles modified. The CEOs of Morgan Stanley and Bank of America also said that President Trump’s pro-crypto tone could reshape their plans and potentially result in expanded digital offerings.
Days earlier, Gary Gensler stepped down from his role as SEC chair. Gensler, who emerged as an adversary to the crypto industry, had defended the rule as crucial to guard investors within the event of crypto firm bankruptcies. Trump’s pick to succeed Gensler is former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins, who’s currently CEO at Patomak Global Partners.
Silk Road founder gets out of prison
Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the web site Silk Road, appears in an undated photograph constituted of his computer and presented as an exhibit during his 2015 criminal trial in Latest York federal court.
SDNY | Via Reuters
Trump’s first big nod to the crypto industry as president got here earlier within the week and took a really different form.
On Tuesday, his second day in office, Trump granted a full pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the founding father of Silk Road. Ulbricht, 40, had been serving a life sentence without the potential for parole since 2015, after he was convicted in federal court on seven charges that included distributing narcotics and conspiring to commit computer hacking.
Silk Road operated from 2011 to 2013, serving as a dark web marketplace where users bought and sold a combination of contraband, including illegal narcotics like heroin. The platform facilitated greater than $200 million in sales, in line with federal prosecutors, and was tied to the death of no less than six people.
At its peak, Silk Road functioned as a worldwide drug bazaar, with transactions conducted largely in bitcoin, making it considered one of the earliest large-scale applications of a cryptocurrency. Prosecutors later argued that the anonymity afforded by bitcoin was instrumental in letting Silk Road vendors mask their identities.
Ulbricht had turn into a cult hero of sorts within the crypto community, and the “Free Ross” movement had gained resonance amongst conservative media personalities and politicians.
“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday.
Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire co-founder and former CEO of Binance, commented on X with a clapping emoji after the pardon was announced. Zhao was sentenced to 4 months in prison in April, after pleading guilty to charges of enabling money laundering at his crypto exchange.
The Trump meme coins
Hakan Nural | Getty Images
Not all of Trump’s actions prior to now week have been universally praised by the crypto industry.
Most notably, the president has been frolicking in an element of the market that is notorious for scams. Last weekend, while crypto leaders and members of Trump’s family and inner circle were partying on the Crypto Ball in Washington, the $TRUMP meme coin was taking off online.
Then got here the $MELANIA coin. Taken together, the Trump family made billions of dollars on paper on account of their ownership of assets created out of thin air. Crypto enthusiasts worry that it is a troubling sign of Trump’s real intent and is damaging to the credibility of an industry that is attempting to prove its legitimacy.
“Call me quaint but I believe presidents should give attention to running the country and never launching scam tokens,” wrote Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures, in a post on X.
The website for $TRUMP says 80% of the provision is held by the Trump Organization and affiliates.
Lawmakers even have objections.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jake Auchincloss, each Massachusetts Democrats, raised issues regarding the primary couple using their positions for enrichment, together with the potential for “rug-pull” scams.
“We write with deep concern in regards to the decision by President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump to launch two meme coins, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, that allow them to earn extraordinary profits off his Presidency,” the pair said in a letter obtained by CNBC.com. “These coins don’t create recent faster, cheaper, and safer payments rails. These coins don’t help people borrow more affordably. They don’t improve the economic system in any way for consumers.”
$TRUMP is now trading at under $30, down greater than 50% from its peak shortly after launch. The $MELANIA token has plunged greater than 80% from its high, and is currently trading below $2.50.
The meme coins are subject to a multi-year vesting schedule, ensuring that the vast majority of tokens can’t be liquidated all of sudden. Without selling any tokens, former Coinbase executive and crypto analyst Conor Grogan estimates that the Trump team still generated $58 million in trading fees on the primary day.
Skepticism is not limited to the meme coins.
In Trump’s executive order on Thursday, the president fell in need of directing the U.S. to begin buying bitcoin directly and holding it as a reserve.
Ahead of the order, Binance CEO Richard Teng told CNBC in Davos that he anticipated the U.S. would establish a strategic bitcoin reserve. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire called it “prudent” for central banks to carry reserves in bitcoin.
Trump had floated the thought on the campaign trail, suggesting that a U.S. bitcoin reserve could possibly be backed by crypto assets seized from hackers and fraud rings, a proposal that continues to be into account.
But in his 1,300-word executive order on Thursday, Trump didn’t just avoid calling for a bitcoin reserve. The word bitcoin was nowhere to be found.
— CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.
