President Donald Trump’s crypto-friendly approach started immediately upon entering the White House. He made venture capitalist David Sacks the White House’s “AI and crypto czar;” he appointed Patrick Witt to be executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets; and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are both widely supportive of crypto. Three days into his second term—a year ago tomorrow—Trump issued an executive order on digital assets, declaring that cryptocurrencies and digital assets were crucial to the country’s economic development, and establishing a working group to recommend pro-crypto regulatory changes. And the easiest way to make that happen is by appointing pro-crypto regulators.
In July, Jonathan Gould—who served as the chief legal officer at the blockchain company Bitfury—was confirmed as comptroller of the currency. Last week, pro-crypto interim Federal Insurance Department Corp. Chairman Travis Hill was sworn in to a five-year term.
At the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)—one of the most important financial regulators for the crypto industry—Michael Selig, who previously served as chief counsel of the SEC’s crypto task force, now serves as chairman. Following the departure of commissioners Kristin Johnson, Summer Mersinger, and Caroline Pham last year, Selig is now the only member of what is typically a five-member bipartisan commission. Perhaps the most high-profile personnel change, however, is at the SEC, where Paul Atkins was sworn in as chairman last April. Atkins, who previously served on the board of advisers for Token Alliance, an initiative started by the crypto advocacy group Digital Chamber, is joined on the commission by Mark Uyeda and Hester Peirce, both of whom have been supportive of the crypto industry.
Under Trump, the SEC’s crypto policy is less notable for what it has done than what it is no longer doing. The new SEC has dropped high-profile enforcement actions against Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance, closed its investigation into Robinhood without bringing charges, and settled its long-running case against Ripple, while initiating only four enforcement actions against public companies and subsidiaries during fiscal year 2025, the fewest since at least fiscal year 2013. In January 2025, the commission also rescinded a staff bulletin that required SEC registrants, such as banks, to record customer crypto holdings as liabilities, which made crypto custody services expensive for traditional financial institutions.
“Under President Trump, the SEC is working overtime to make America the ‘crypto capital of the world,’” Atkins told TMD in a statement. “We’ve ended the previous administration’s regulation-by-enforcement regime, which classified nearly every digital asset as a ‘security,’ and launched Project Crypto to modernize our securities rules and regulations to enable America’s financial markets to move on-chain.”
Congress has yet to pass a comprehensive market structure bill, Atkins noted, but the commission isn’t waiting. “The Crypto Task Force is working across the SEC’s policy divisions to implement the recommendations of the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets to maintain U.S. dominance in crypto asset markets.”
The change is already reshaping how the industry operates. “In the past year, we have seen a much more welcoming regulatory environment for developers and for innovation, and that is really huge when you contrast it to the years prior, where this industry had to worry about receiving subpoenas or enforcement actions constantly,” Amanda Tuminelli, executive director and chief legal officer of the DeFi Education Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group, told TMD. In turn, that means the industry has been able to spend more time—and resources—on growth in the U.S. and on proactive regulatory efforts.
“Our member companies are no longer spending a ton of money on litigation and fighting back against government overreach,” Summer Mersinger, CEO of the Blockchain Association and a former CFTC commissioner, told TMD. “What we’ve seen is a shift where these businesses are now able to use that money to grow and hire in the U.S.”
But a friendlier SEC is only part of the story; the crypto industry wants meaningful legislation. In April, Congress used the new Congressional Review Act to repeal an IRS rule that would have classified some decentralized finance (DeFi) firms as brokers—a compliance burden that many couldn’t have met, because they don’t collect the same information from customers as traditional brokers.
Even more importantly, in July, Trump signed the Genius Act into law—the first substantial crypto legislation in the country’s history. The act created comprehensive regulatory guidelines for stablecoins—a form of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a one-to-one value with an asset like the dollar and one of the most compelling use cases for crypto technology for everyday consumers. “The bipartisan passage of the Genius Act is a huge step forward,” Tuminelli said.
An even more critical legislative victory, however, is still on the horizon—a comprehensive market structure bill that would clarify which regulators oversee certain digital assets and crypto firms, and potentially pave the way for more widespread adoption of blockchain technology across the U.S. economy.
A version of this market structure bill—the Clarity Act—passed the House this summer, but a separate version is now being drafted in the Senate. The Senate Banking Committee, one of the two Senate committees with authority over the bill, was supposed to hold a markup of its draft last week but delayed the hearing to give the committee additional time to negotiate several controversial provisions.
Key for many Democrats is including conflict-of-interest language that would prohibit many senior government officials and their families from issuing, endorsing, or profiting from digital assets. The language is aimed at Trump and his sons, who now operate or profit from a growing empire of crypto firms and assets, including a DeFi company, a Bitcoin mining operation, and presidential memecoin.
For some in the crypto industry, rulemaking—the process by which federal agencies actually turn legislation into rules and regulations—is just as important as the passage of crypto legislation. Even with congressional action on crypto, the industry cannot act confidently without clear guidance from regulatory agencies. That process has begun for the Genius Act, but it could take years for something as comprehensive and complex as a market structure bill. “We need clear, durable law in place, and that means everybody has to work together,” Tuminelli said.
Industry skeptics and proponents of tighter regulation, for their part, are concerned about just how far the Trump administration has gone to embrace the crypto industry. “I think ultimately, when you look at what this president has achieved so far, it’s deregulation, gutting of enforcement, and dropping crypto cases in ways that are politically and financially advantageous to him personally,” Corey Frayer, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America and the senior adviser to Gensler on crypto markets during the Biden administration, told TMD. “The short-term benefits that crypto markets are seeing from that activity are ultimately damaging to the broader marketplace, both through the erosion of trust and from the failure to provide the fundamental guardrails that we’ve learned over more than a century are necessary for a well-functioning financial marketplace.”
But with so much key legislation and rulemaking still on the horizon, some industry observers are cautious about declaring 2025 an overwhelming success for crypto in the U.S. “I’m still very optimistic, but I just think it’s just too early to say ‘This has been great, we’ve done all these things,’” Norbert Michel, vice president and director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, told TMD. For Michel, a looser regulatory regime and more cooperative administration are an improvement over the Biden administration’s enforcement regime, but somewhat meaningless if durable reform doesn’t follow.
“We have taken positive steps. There is a lot of momentum, there are a lot of good vibes, there’s a lot of good intention, there’s a lot of good signs,” Michel said. But as far as durable changes, Michel says, “We’ll have to see.”
