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A guy, stool-bound inside the front door of PubKey, a Bitcoin-themed bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, motioned for my ID. I reached for my wallet. But wait—turns out he wasn’t actually working the door. “We’re just trying to get people,” he told me, chortling. Epic prank, sir!
Hence got, I made my way to the bar’s backroom for a panel called “Coin Based: Concepts of a Plan for Nation-State Bitcoin Adoption.” “My how things have changed,” read the online event page. “Ideas that only a few weeks ago were laughed at by pundits and commentators are now on the table.”
It was time to decide what exactly the crypto community desires from the Trump administration on a policy level, and a few dozen guys had gathered to listen to a four-guy panel debate potentiallegislative achievements that could define Trump 2.0. It was off to an annoying start, as expected, but money buys you that right, even digital money.
The 2024 election was a crypto election, not because there is broad popular support for cryptocurrency, but because the “industry” paid handsomely to make it so. A small handful of sector whales raised an astonishing $238 million to influence the 2024 field, by far the most corporate cash of any industry. The majority of it went to super PACs, which spent well over $100 million on races all over the country. The sector kicked in another $17 million to lobby already-elected members of Congress. Already, one crypto super PAC, Fairshake, has raised over $100 million to influence the 2026 elections, as well.
Some of that money was spread out, bipartisan-like, but most of it went to Republicans, and a lot went to Trump. (His campaign began accepting donations in crypto last May.) Tech billionaires including the Winklevosses and Marc Andreessen piled millions into Trump’s campaign coffers, declaring that the Biden administration was at war with crypto. They bought Trump big at the height of his glide-path mania, at a time when an enfeebled Biden looked hopeless but hadn’t yet dropped out. Then came Kamala Harris, riding a frenzy of good feelings and robust polling before her post-convention nosedive. For months, it looked like dumb money.
But if the 2020s have taught us anything, it’s that dumb money is often a matter of timing. And in the end, crypto got their man. Now it is time to collect.
In late July, Trump made time for a keynote address at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. There, he promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet,” create a Bitcoin “strategic reserve,” implement a crypto advisory council, and fire pesky Securities and Exchange Commission ChairGary Gensler on Day 1.
“From now on the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry,” said the president, who had—mu