The denizens of cryptoland have erupted into celebration and gleeful told-you-so’s after Donald Trump, the self-styled “crypto president,” was voted back into the White House on Wednesday morning.
Under the Democratic administration led by President Joe Biden, crypto companies have felt they were being singled out for persecution by US financial regulators and denied access to essential services like banking. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, the current vice president, was viewed by the crypto faithful as complicit by proximity and likely to replicate this strategy. (Harris never declared her intentions towards the crypto industry.) But a victory for Trump marks the start of a promising new chapter, they say.
“This election was completely existential for crypto in the US,” claims Nic Carter, a general partner at crypto-focused VC firm Castle Island Ventures. “The first [response] is relief. We have been trying to build businesses with one hand tied behind our backs. I can’t emphasize how hard that is.”
Under Trump, the industry expects a far friendlier reception from regulators, says Carter, as well as legislation that sets out specific rules for crypto firms. And if Trump incorporates bitcoin into the US government’s balance sheet, advocates speculate it could stoke demand for bitcoin among other world powers, thereby further inflating the price, which rose to record heights after Trump’s victory was confirmed. In short, to them, everything is coming up Milhouse.
“Just ceasing the hostilities would have been immensely positive, but we got something better: a candidate that is overtly pro-crypto,” says Carter. “Last night could not have gone any better.”
Some of crypto’s largest companies—among them crypto exchange Coinbase and stablecoin issuer Circle—have insisted during the 2024 election cycle that crypto need not become a partisan issue. But crypto figureheads largely lined up behind the Republican candidate: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, cofounders of crypto platform Gemini, each donated $1 million to Trump, as did Jesse Powell, cofounder of the Kraken exchange. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose VC firm a16z has invested billions of dollars in crypto startups, publicly endorsed Trump for the presidency.
“We are on the brink of a new American Renaissance,” wrote Tyler Winklevoss in a post on X, after it became clear that Trump had beaten Harris.
On the campaign trail, Trump went out of his way to court their favor. In July, speaking to thousands of bitcoiners at a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump duly sang from the bitcoin hymn sheet, promising to cement the US as the foremost bitcoin mining powerhouse, establish a national “bitcoin stockpile,” and appoint a bitcoin advisory council if reelected. Trump claimed he would turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet.”
In October, Trump went as far as to launch his own crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, which his family has marketed as a way to “make finance great again.” The platform is set to provide peer-to-peer borrowing and lending services of some flavor, though the Trumps have provided few hard details.
“If you were a single-issue voter that cares about the growth of sound money through bitcoin, Trump was the clear choice,” says Peter McCormack, host of the podcast What Bitcoin Did.
By contrast, Harris’ Democratic platform for 2024 did not include any mention of crypto, and she made only a single reference to crypto on the campaign trail, in a pitch to donors in New York City, Bloomberg reported. “We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets while protecting consumers and investors. We will create a safe business environment with consistent and transparent rules of the road,” Harris is quoted as saying.
Reticence in the Harris camp to take a public stance on crypto was interpreted by industry members as a signal that her presidency would represent a continuation of the bad old times under Biden. “We saw no evidence that she was going to moderate the stance at all,” says Carter.
Democrat-supporting members of the crypto industry were left in an awkward position; though they aligned with Harris’ politics, it was conceivable that victory for Trump would be a more beneficial outcome for the sector. “As a crypto entrepreneur, I’m excited about the prospect of a bull market,” says Jonathan Padilla, one of the organizers of Crypto4Harris, a coalition of left-leaning members of the crypto industry. “For crypto in isolation, Trump is probably going to be the much quicker shot of sugar,” says Padilla, even if the president later loses interest.
Although the failure to make a persuasive pitch to the crypto electorate is surely not to blame for Harris losing the presidential race to Trump, concedes Padilla, the crypto industry was able to mobilize its capital to put a finger on the political scale.
During the 2024 cycle, crypto firms donated hundreds of millions of dollars to three crypto-friendly super political action committees (PACs)—Fairshake, Protect Progress, and Defend American Jobs—the aim of which was to support crypto-friendly congressional candidates and dislodge the industry’s most vociferous critics.
The fruits of that investment became clear on Wednesday. In Ohio, incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, who is depicted as an arch-villain in crypto circles, was unseated by Republican Bernie Moreno. Through Defend American Jobs, the crypto industry spent more than $40 million in support of Moreno.
Meanwhile, according to Stand With Crypto, a nonprofit pushing for bespoke crypto regulation in the US, more than 250 pro-crypto representatives have been elected to Congress. “If there’s one thing that crypto probably will have done very effectively it is influence the House,” says Padilla.
With Trump in the Oval Office, the industry expects to benefit from further opportunities to access the corridors of power. Dante Disparte, chief strategy officer and head of global policy at Circle, believes that a Trump government will allow his business to advise on policy in the same way it does in the rest of the world. “My hope and expectation is that we would have equal access to an incoming Trump administration,” says Disparte.
Though change will inevitably be gradual, crypto has earned a “victory lap,” says Disparte. “I’m very confident that 2025 can be a breakthrough year.”
