By Joe LightFollow
Published: July 26, 2024 at 3:00 a.m. ET
Donald Trump.PHOTO: BRANDON BELL/GETTY IMAGES
Referenced Symbols
While Donald Trump’s plans to speak at a major Bitcoin
BTCUSD3.07% conference this weekend have crypto investors hoping for details about a Republican administration’s policy agenda, make no mistake: For the former president, this is all about campaign donations.
Trump on Saturday is scheduled to give a keynote address at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tenn. Some Bitcoin investors think Trump will use the platform to make a major announcement, such as to throw his support behind having the U.S. government buy Bitcoin as a “strategic reserve” asset, akin to foreign currencies, or oil.
Such a move would likely require legislation, meaning it has almost no chance of happening soon. But Trump nodding to that or any other pro-crypto agenda could certainly help prices.
The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Bitcoin was down about 1.8% in the past 24 hours through Thursday afternoon. For the year, it was up 46%, driven in part by the release of the first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in January, as well as increasing expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates.
NOW PLAYING: How Passive Shareholders Can Affect Corporate Policies
https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.653.0_en.html#goog_1049100415
Trump was decidedly not a pro-crypto president. In 2019, he tweeted that he was “not a fan” of Bitcoin and other cryptos, calling them based on “thin air.” The Securities and Exchange Commission brought myriad cases against companies trying to raise money through “initial coin offerings,” which the agency said were in effect unregistered initial public offerings.
Just before the change in administration, the SEC brought one of crypto’s most-hated lawsuits, against Ripple Labs, claiming that the token XRP was an unregistered security. Even after Trump left office, he kept up the anti-Bitcoin rhetoric, calling it a “scam against the dollar” in 2021.
But everything changed when Trump launched his 2024 campaign and it became clear that he could raise millions in contributions from the industry. Now he is billing himself as the pro-crypto candidate, and industry executives are falling in line.
In May, Trump said he would start taking crypto donations, and the campaign says it has raised $4 million worth of Bitcoin and other tokens so far. The pro-crypto Fairshake political-action committee has raised around $170 million, making it one of the largest PACs this election cycle.
Some venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have said they are backing Trump because of their frustration with Democratic crypto policy. Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, is himself a crypto investor.
While Trump can’t unilaterally force the country to buy crypto, there are policies that industry executives hope he can help out with. Chief among them is turning down the enforcement heat on the industry. SEC Chair Gary Gensler continued his predecessor’s lawsuits against the industry and brought several of his own, accusing crypto platforms such as Coinbase Global
of operating unregistered securities exchanges. The industry’s hope is that a new SEC chief would drop those actions.
“A change in SEC leadership would stem the tide of enforcement actions,” wrote Compass Point Research & Trading analysts Ed Groshans and Joe Flynn in a note.
The industry also wants rules changed to make it easier for banks and other companies to hold cryptocurrencies. It thinks applying know-your-customer requirements to decentralized exchanges—as some agencies want—is untenable and that the government’s hostile stance is pushing jobs abroad. Trump appointees could reverse many of those actions.
Finally, a Trump administration increases the chance that industry-friendly laws would be passed in the next couple of years, the Compass Point analysts wrote. Both the House and Senate have worked on bills that would put most of the crypto industry outside of the SEC’s purview. While there is an outside chance the bills could be passed toward the end of this year, with a Republican administration, such a bill would have a better-than-even chance of becoming law, the analysts said.
It’s unclear how much of a focus the crypto industry would actually be in a second Trump administration when weighed against larger battles like overhauling the tax system and trade policy. But for now, even positive sound bites from a potential future president are like a glass of cold water to an industry that has spent the better part of its existence fighting regulatory heat.
Write to Joe Light at joe.light@barrons.com