US President Donald Trump did not write crypto policy. He did not negotiate legislation or draft legislative guidelines. But without his sweeping demands from the White House and the pressure he’s put on his political allies in Congress, it’s hard to imagine the industry would have had the several major successes it’s celebrated during his first year back in office.
This feature is part of CoinDesk’s The list of most influential 2025.
Between his first and second administrations, Trump made a stunning reversal of his early misgivings about digital assets, not only jumping aboard the sector’s bandwagon but claiming a role as its new conductor. The same president whose Securities and Exchange Commission (then headed by former chairman Jay Clayton) once sued Ripple, effectively kicking off the regulation-by-enforcement approach to the sector, arrived in his second term on a wave of pro-crypto campaign promises.
Trump has largely delivered on those promises, signing several orders that set an agenda for his regulators and Congress, and appointing regulators who would put pro-crypto policy work very high on their priority lists. The president said he would make the United States the global leader in crypto, and his digital assets team promised a “golden age” for crypto. Trump ordered a comprehensive US regulatory regime for digital asset activity and for stablecoin issuers. He also called for two crypto reserves as long-term federal investments, the first such “strategic reserve” in bitcoin and the other in every other token.
So far, the ambitious agenda is incomplete.
Trump was able to celebrate one big White House as Congress managed to thread a tricky needle to get his stablecoin bill through the once recalcitrant Senate, where Trump demanded that the House of Representatives sign the legislation without further edits. The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act became the law of the land as the president sat before a gathering of top crypto executives and his cabinet members in attendance.
It was clearly intended as an appetizer ahead of the main course: a bill that would clearly define how digital assets would be defined and how transactions with them would be overseen by the federal government.
This is where Trump’s efforts have fallen short. While his allies managed to get a market structure bill to the floor of the House, where it passed with unusual support across the aisle, it stalled in the Senate. Despite Trump’s ambitious summer deadline, the Senate is where legislation has often languished. The reasons are many, including its narrower access to floor time, that it usually requires a 60-vote, bipartisan majority to advance anything, and there’s a greater opportunity for individual members to throw wrenches in the works. It didn’t help that Congress’s failure to act on a budget slammed the door on the federal government for weeks amid legislative negotiations.
Democrats have some significant complaints and concerns in the draft bill that was unveiled in the Banking and Agriculture Committees. Much of their focus is on consumer protection and preventing bad guys from abusing the technology. But the most political and controversial backlash is focused on the president himself.
When Trump changed his mind about crypto, he jumped in with his entire wallet. He personally started monetizing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with him in various heroic scenes. He and his family have steadily entered almost every other corner of the crypto and blockchain sector, with a stake in World Liberty Financial, a Trump-themed memecoin launched just before he took office, a family push into crypto mining, and most recently with the Trump Media & Technology Group preparing a jump into prediction markets. The clearest expression of this fusion of public office and the private financial market is the fusion of public office and the private that increases Trump’s economic upside. than $550 million in a KYC token sale for its WLFI governance token even before returning to the White House.
Public disclosures later showed that Trump family members controlled about 22.5 billion WLFI, a stake of about $5 billion when the token began trading around $0.23 in the fall. Since then, the project has attempted to evolve from a memecoin with MAGA aesthetics into a serious DeFi and payments play, with WLFI as the political governance layer for its USD1 stablecoin and an incoming suite of “real asset” products.
Around WLFI, a full Trump coin complex has taken shape. $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins spent most of 2024 whipsawing at every campaign rally, political headline, and late-night TV monologue, briefly outperforming most of the altcoin market before giving back most of their gains.
In June, Trump’s middle son Eric Trump said World Liberty Financial would take a stake in the TRUMP token itself, effectively tying the family’s flagship protocol to the most speculative corner of its own meme ecosystem and inviting comparisons to the FTX/Alameda loop.
There are almost no crypto roads not traveled by Trump, who has reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars from his digital assets. Since he also steers his administration’s crypto policy, congressional Democrats have loudly protested the apparent conflict of interest.
As recently as a House hearing on banking regulation on Dec. 2, Trump-appointed officials said they agreed to rules that prohibit regulators and Fed board members from engaging in bank ownership or management to avoid conflicts. But when asked if the same standard should be applied to a president who controls crypto policy when he has financial ties to the industry, they declined to answer.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee issued a report declaring that the situation represented a “new age of corruption.”
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt denied that there is any conflict of interest involving crypto with Trump or his family. “Through executive actions, supporting legislation like the GENIUS Act, and other common sense policies, the administration is fulfilling the president’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans,” she told CoinDesk in a statement.
However, the actions with the most immediate impact for the crypto industry may have been Trump’s appointments. Before this year, the industry widely viewed former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler as its main government foe. Gensler’s SEC refused to write custom crypto rules and instead guided the industry through a series of enforcement actions and court battles. But Trump’s replacement for Gensler, Paul Atkins, launched “Project Crypto” and called its efforts — including policies around the tokenization of securities — his top priority.
Across the financial agencies, Trump installed regulators eager to meet the demands of his crypto orders. Their initiatives, such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s push to have regulated platforms offer leveraged spot crypto products, are already underway long before any future market structure legislation could emerge from Congress.
“To achieve President Trump’s vision of making America the crypto capital of the world, the SEC must holistically consider the potential benefits and risks of moving our markets from an off-chain environment to an on-chain environment,” Atkins said in the speech introducing Project Crypto. “President Trump has said that America is in its golden age — and under our new agenda, our crypto asset economy will be too,” he said.
