03-21-2025 
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United States President Donald Trump thinks digital assets are swell, but concerns are mounting that America’s ‘anything goes’ approach could lay the groundwork for the next global financial crisis.
- Trump talks, BTC falls
- Digital asset legislation timelines
- Trump’s removal of crypto guardrails unnerves Europe
- Ripple dances on SEC’s grave
- Ripple focused on RLUSD stablecoin, not IPO (for now)
- Trump’s crypto grifting finds another gear
On March 20, Trump addressed (via prerecorded video) the Blockworks Digital Asset Summit in New York. The speech was basically a nothingburger, despite advance hype by crypto promoters that some major announcement was in the cards.
Instead, we got some warmed-over criticisms of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, and Operation ChokePoint 2.0, along with self-praise for Trump’s enthusiastic promotion of digital assets, the ongoing removal of regulatory guardrails and the prohibition on future sales of digital assets already in the government’s possession.
Trump closed his five-minute address by telling summit attendees: “Together we will make America the undisputed Bitcoin superpower and crypto capital of the world.” Perhaps, but BTC’s fiat value, which had enjoyed decent gains over the previous 24 hours—partly due to hype that Trump would actually say something substantive—began falling immediately after Trump’s video finished.
Some of that pre-address hype was generated by Bo Hines, executive director of the President’s Working Group on Digital Assets, who spoke at the same summit earlier in the week. Hines doubled down on his previous private comments by telling attendees that the White House was interested in acquiring “as much [BTC] as we can get.”
Hines offered the caveat that this acquisition needed to be done in “budget neutral ways,” as laid out in Trump’s executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Hine’s comments nonetheless left many with the hope—ultimately dashed—that Trump’s address might explain how these budget-neutral acquisitions might occur. (Here’s one theory.)
Legislation timetable
Hines also addressed the White House’s expectations for Congress approving two key pieces of digital asset legislation: one covering stablecoins and another establishing an overall market structure for regulating digital assets.
Hines praised the Senate Banking Committee’s recent approval of the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act “in extremely bipartisan fashion.” Assuming GENIUS passes a Senate floor vote and can navigate its way through the House of Representatives—which has multiple stablecoin bills of its own in play—Hines believes “stables could be on the president’s desk here in the next two months.”
Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association lobbying group, offered a slightly less optimistic timeline. Speaking at the same summit on March 19, Smith said, “I think we’re close to being able to get [both stable and market structure bills) done for August.” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a prominent crypto supporter, told the summit only that he expects that both bills “should be able” to become law by year’s end.
The market structure bill appears to be the more complex of the two legislative tracks, as Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), who chairs the House Financial Service Committee’s (FSC) digital assets subcommittee, seems more eager than some to start from scratch.
Steil told Politico last week that legislators were “not bound” to follow the trail blazed by FIT21, the market structure bill that passed a House floor vote last summer. Steil said, “the political landscape has completely changed in a very positive way” since FIT21’s vote, opening up possibilities that could go much further in loosening existing constraints on the digital asset sector.
Last month, Steil offered assurances that “reasonable consumer protections” would be included in any new crypto regulatory structure. However, Steil added that his “broader philosophical goal” was “to make sure the United States is in a position to out-compete the rest of the world’ when it came to digital assets.
The thing is, the rest of the world isn’t so sure this is a good thing, and not because they’re all that interested in competing for this crown.
Bank on it
Trump’s ‘stand down’ directives to regulatory agencies and banks are erasing the few guardrails that contain the excesses for which the digital asset sector is infamous. While ‘crypto bros’ are rejoicing, those with no crypto bags to pump are sounding the alarm for what this might mean for the wider financial sector.
An op-ed in Canada’s Globe and Mail offered this grim forecast for what might occur in the wake of all this deregulation. “Financial crises … don’t start when everyone panics and market collapses. They start long before, often when rent-seeking insiders quietly loosen the bolts of regulation while no one else is paying attention or prevent regulation in the first place, bending public policy toward private advantage in ways that put innocent bystanders at risk.”
Bloomberg published an article last week on a derivatives-focused conference in Florida, at which Wall Street players were positively giddy about the money-making crypto opportunities opening up, thanks to the new federal administration.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently reported on how Wall Street is once again embracing asset-backed securities not that dissimilar to those that crashed the global economy in 2008. Think about that the next time you hear some crypto bro talking about the wonders of tokenized securities while blithely hand-waving away concerns regarding the stability of those underlying assets.
With institutional investors and banks now considering their crypto options in a way they most certainly weren’t during previous value bubbles, voices from outside America are growing concerned. Last weekend, Bank of France governor François Villeroy de Galhau said that by “encouraging the development of crypto assets and non-bank finance, the U.S. government is effectively sowing the seeds of future turmoil.”
The governor warned of America “sinning through negligence,” and while every country has the right to set its own policies, “financial crises often originate in the United States and spread to the rest of the world.” This isn’t the first warning that de Galhau, who sits on the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Governing Council, has issued on this subject, but it slaps harder with each new fence post that the U.S. uproots.
Right on time, Reuters reported this week on the push by crypto operators and other fintech firms to obtain U.S. federal banking charters. The feds have approved an average of only five charter applications per year since the 2008 global economic meltdown—down from 144 per year during the preceding decade—in part due to tighter restrictions imposed following that 2008 debacle.A handful of crypto operators have applied for federal bank charters, but only one—digital asset custodian Anchorage Digital—has made the grade (and that wasn’t without its hiccups). Other operators, including the Kraken exchange, have settled for state-level charters in crypto-friendly Wyoming.
Now? Well, let’s just say the bar is being lowered to limbo-level lows. Getting out from under that bar may prove more difficult down the road, but hey, we’ll worry about that when we get there, right?
Ripple applies rear naked choke, SEC taps out
The week’s most important U.S. development may have come on March 19, when Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse tweeted the news that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “will drop its appeal” of the $125 million judgment imposed on Ripple in U.S. federal court last August.
Technically, the SEC still has to vote on the matter, but Garlinghouse has apparently received assurances that “the moment we’ve been waiting for” is finally here. Garlinghouse said the suit, which the SEC filed against Ripple way back in December 2020, “has ended. It’s over.”
That August 2024 ruling by U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres was only a partial victory for the SEC, as the agency had sought a penalty of $2 billion, so the SEC announced its intention to appeal last October.
But that was the old SEC, the one run by Gary Gensler, not this crypto-friendly crew that has paused or scuttled nearly all its crypto-related litigation since Trump took office.
Garlinghouse’s victory speech didn’t spare the OTT rhetoric, saying the SEC was “out to intimidate and terrorize” the entire crypto sector. Luckily for humanity, Ripple was the “first company with the resources, determination and grit to fight back against the agency’s overreach.” Channelling Joseph Campbell, Garlinghouse said Ripple “was not only on the right side of the law” but also “on the right side of history.”
Like most of the SEC’s crypto-related suits, the charge was that Ripple’s XRP token was an unregistered security, and thus, Ripple’s sales of it were illegal. Two federal courts took different views of this argument, but none of that matters now.
The XRP token’s fiat value leaped from around $2.30 to $2.57 on the news, and while it’s since surrendered some of those gains, the improved position was sufficient to push XRP into third place on the overall token market cap charts. This came at the expense of USDT, the stablecoin issued by Tether, despite the latter minting another $1 billion that day.
Ripple’s future plans
In a Bloomberg interview on Wednesday, Garlinghouse referenced the $125 million that was put in escrow following last August’s ruling, suggesting that Ripple “wouldn’t mind having that back. That’s on the table.”
Garlinghouse said he “would expect” that XRP would end up in Trump’s Digital Asset Stockpile, the bucket into which tokens other than BTC already in the government’s possession will be dumped. Trump included XRP—along with SOL and ADA—in a March 2 Truth Social post detailing his ‘stockpile’ plans, but no tokens were specified by name when the stockpile was officially announced.
Trump’s team has made it clear that no government funds will be spent—budget-neutral or otherwise—acquiring new tokens for this stockpile, meaning only XRP already in the government’s possession would be included. Of course, Trump has been known to abruptly shift policy positions, so watch this space.
Pressed on whether Ripple will join the crypto initial public offering (IPO) rush, Garlinghouse said it was “possible” but “isn’t a huge priority.” Ripple is more interested in acquisitions of “blockchain infrastructure companies” and seeing RLUSD, the stablecoin it launched last year, become “top five in the market by the end of the year.” Garlinghouse also predicted that XRP-based exchanged-traded funds (ETFs) would get SEC approval sometime this year.
Just give Trump your money already
While Garlinghouse waits for his ETF diploma, Trump is busy making major bank from his various crypto endeavors. The $550 million success of the second round of token sales from his decentralized finance (DeFi) project World Liberty Financial (WLF) means a Trump-owned entity (DT Marks DEFI) can expect a payout of $390 million, based on a structure that promises DT Marks a 75% stake of WLF revenue. Not bad for a DeFi project that has yet to do anything remotely DeFi-related.
That payday is separate from the millions Trump earned from his $TRUMP memecoin, which was released on the Friday before his inauguration ceremony in January. This month, the Financial Times reported that the entities behind $TRUMP made at least $350 million from token sales and trading fees.
$TRUMP briefly soared above $70 but is currently struggling to stay above $11. While Trump and his partners hit paydirt, an estimated 810,000 TRUMP purchasers collectively lost $2 billion from their experience with this ‘collectible.’ Still, the friends we made along the way, huh?
Trump’s digital asset earnings may only be getting started. On March 19, Forbes reported on an SEC filing by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG)—the Trump-controlled entity behind the Truth Social platform—detailing the launch of a new special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
This Cayman Islands-registered SPAC is called Renatus Tactical Acquisition Corp I. Renatus wants to raise $179 million via an IPO to acquire “high potential businesses based in the United States in the cryptocurrency and blockchain, data security and dual use technologies markets.”
Assuming it can raise this nine-figure sum, will Renatus follow through on any of its lofty goals? Or will it remain an inert project like WLF? Hey, what if Renatus acquires WLF, creating a financial circle-jerk that allows all these millions to simply disappear in a haze of buzzwords and empty promises? Watch this space.
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