US President Donald Trump did not write a crypto policy. He did not negotiate legislation or draw up regulatory guidelines. But without his sweeping demands from the White House and the pressure he has put on his political allies in Congress, it is difficult to imagine the industry would have had the significant successes it celebrated during his first year in office.
This feature is part of CoinDesk List of the most influential of 2025.
Between his first and second administrations, Trump made a surprising turn from his initial suspicions about digital assets, not only jumping on the sector’s bandwagon but also demanding a role as its new driver. The same president whose Securities and Exchange Commission (then under the leadership of former Chairman Jay Clayton) once sued Ripple, effectively kicking off the sector’s regulation-by-enforcement approach, entered his second term on a wave of pro-cryptocurrency campaign promises.
Trump has largely delivered on those promises, signing multiple executive orders that set an agenda for his regulators and Congress, and appointing regulators who would put pro-cryptocurrency policy work high on their priority lists. The president said he would make the United States the world leader in cryptocurrencies, and his digital assets team promised a “golden age” for cryptocurrencies. Trump ordered a comprehensive regulatory regime in the United States for digital asset activity and for stablecoin issuers. He also called for two cryptocurrency reserves as long-term federal investments, the first such “strategic reserve” in bitcoin. and the second in every two tokens.
So far, that ambitious agenda is incomplete.
Trump was able to throw a big celebration at the White House when Congress managed to thread a difficult needle in getting his stablecoin bill passed by the once-recalcitrant Senate, and Trump demanded that the House of Representatives pass the legislation without further amendments. The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act became the law of the land, and the president spoke at a meeting of top cryptocurrency CEOs and members of his cabinet attended.
It was clearly intended to be an appetizer before the main course: a bill that would clearly define how digital assets would be defined and how the federal government would oversee transactions with them.
That’s where Trump’s efforts have failed. While his allies managed to bring a market structure bill to the House floor, where it passed with unusual bipartisan support, it came to a screeching halt in the Senate. Despite Trump’s ambitious summer deadline, the Senate is where legislation has often languished. The reasons are many, including their more restricted access to session time, which typically requires a 60-vote bipartisan majority to advance anything, and there is greater ability for individual members to screw things up. It didn’t help that Congress’s lack of action on a budget shut down the federal government for weeks amid legislative talks.
Democrats have some major complaints and points of concern in the bills introduced in the Banking Committee and the Agriculture Committee. Much of their focus is on consumer protection and preventing bad actors from abusing technology. But the most political and controversial reaction centers on the president himself.
When Trump changed his mind about cryptocurrencies, he went in with his entire wallet. He began personally profiting from non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that featured him in various heroic scenes. He and his family steadily entered almost every other corner of the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector, with a stake in World Liberty Financial, a Trump-themed memecoin launched just before he took office, a family push into cryptocurrency mining, and, most recently, with Trump Media & Technology Group preparing a jump into prediction markets. The clearest expression of that fusion of public office and private advantage is World Liberty Financial, the Trump-branded cryptocurrency company that raised more than $550 million in a KYC token sale for its WLFI governance token even before returning to the White House.
Subsequent public revelations showed that Trump family members controlled approximately 22.5 billion WLFI, a stake valued at around $5 billion when the token began trading around $0.23 this fall. The project has since attempted to evolve from a MAGA-aesthetic memecoin into a serious DeFi and payments game, featuring WLFI as the political governance layer for its $1 stablecoin and an incoming set of “real-world asset” products.
Around WLFI, an entire Trump coin complex has taken shape. Memecoins $TRUMP and $MELANIA spent much of 2024 circling every campaign rally, political headline, and late-night television 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, 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 paths that have not been taken by Trump, who has reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars from his digital asset companies. Since he also directs his administration’s crypto policies, Congressional Democrats have strongly objected to the apparent conflict of interest.
As recently as a House hearing on banking regulation on Dec. 2, Trump appointees said they agreed with rules prohibiting regulators and Federal Reserve board members from participating in the ownership or management of banks to avoid conflicts. But when asked if the same standard should apply 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 era of corruption.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt denied that there is any cryptocurrency-related conflict of interest with Trump or his family. “Through executive actions, supportive 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 crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans,” he told CoinDesk in a statement.
However, the actions with the most immediate effect for the cryptocurrency industry may have been Trump’s appointments. Before this year, the industry widely viewed former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler as its chief government enemy. Gensler’s SEC declined to draft custom crypto regulations and instead guided the industry through a series of enforcement actions and court battles. But Gensler’s Trump replacement, Paul Atkins, launched “Project Crypto” and called its efforts, including policies around securities tokenization, his top priority.
Across financial agencies, Trump installed regulators who are eager to meet the demands of his cryptocurrency orders. Their initiatives, such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s push to get regulated platforms to offer leveraged spot crypto products, are already underway, long before any future market structure bills can emerge from Congress.
“To achieve President Trump’s vision of making America the crypto capital of the world, the SEC must comprehensively consider the potential benefits and risks of moving our markets from an off-chain to an on-chain environment,” Atkins said in the speech introducing the Crypto Project. “President Trump has said that the United States is in its Golden Age and, under our new agenda, our crypto asset economy will be too,” he said.
