Trump firms up ‘crypto’ appointments, plots executive orders

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United States President-elect Donald Trump continues to build his ‘crypto’ policy team while mulling executive orders he can impose on ‘day one’ of his second term in office.

On December 22, Trump’s Truth Social account announced “the brilliant Team that will be working in conjunction with our White House A.I. & Crypto Czar, David O. Sacks.” There were a few general tech positions announced, but for our purposes we’ll focus on the blockchain-specific posts.

These include Bo Hines as the executive director of the new Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets (aka the ‘crypto council’). Trump said Hines will work with Sacks, the Council’s new chairman, to “foster innovation and growth in the digital assets space, while ensuring industry leaders have the resources they need to succeed.”

Hines is a 29-year-old lawyer, former college football player and a failed House of Representatives candidate in North Carolina in 2022 (Hines tried to run again in 2024 but failed to secure the GOP nomination). A vocal denier of Trump’s election defeat in 2020, Hines’ 2022 campaign was endorsed by Trump, much to the chagrin of local Republicans.

Hines’ 2022 campaign received contributions from crypto-focused political action committees, including funds directed by Ryan Salame, the former FTX exec currently serving 90 months in federal prison for campaign funding violations.

And yet, Hines appears to have made just one blockchain-specific social media post at the beginning of 2024, when he called crypto “the epitome of individual empowerment in finance.” Hines claimed crypto should be allowed to “grow organically,” and the government shouldn’t be “stepping in and slapping burdensome regulations on financial innovation.”

Following Trump’s announcement, Sacks said it had been “a pleasure to work with @BoHines during the Transition and I look forward to continuing our partnership in the new Administration.” But Sacks was less magnanimous about recent reporting that the impact of his new ‘czar’ title would be less than initially imagined.

Over the weekend, Fortune quoted two unidentified sources who claimed that Sacks’ new gig had shifted from a true ‘leadership’ position to more of a ‘general advisory’ role. This alleged downgrade was said to be due to Sacks’ refusal to (a) divest himself from his investment firm, and (b) submit to a formal confirmation process on Capitol Hill.

Sacks rubbished this report as “total nonsense,” dismissing Fortune as “some Legacy Media.” Sacks said he expects to “spend 50% of my time in D.C. guiding policy and 50% in Silicon Valley staying on the cutting edge.” Sacks said this “seems ideal for a tech policy role and it’s exactly what I requested.”

In a lesser-noted crypto-adjacent appointment, Trump tapped Scott Kupor as director of the Office of Personnel Management. Kupor is a managing partner at the Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) venture capital firm, which has significant investments in crypto projects and was one of the largest contributors to crypto-focused PACs in the 2024 election cycle. (Another a16z partner, Sriram Krishnan, has been given an advisory role on AI.)

And over at the U.S. Senate, efforts to renominate Caroline Crenshaw for a second term as Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner came undone when pro-crypto pols blocked a finance committee vote. Crenshaw will almost certainly not be renominated under Trump, which, combined with the already scheduled departures of commissioner Jamie Lizárraga and SEC chair Gary Gensler, could leave the SEC devoid of any real crypto skeptics. Fun times.

The Fed’s BTC reserve reservations

Trump also announced Stephen Miran as his new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Miran is a senior strategist with the Hudson Bay Capital Management hedge fund who previously served as a senior economic policy adviser at the Treasury Department during Trump’s first term.

Earlier this month, Miran claimed that “crypto has a big role potentially to play in innovation and ushering in another Trump administration economic boom.”

Miran is also a fierce critic of the U.S. Federal Reserve and has called for a structural overhaul that would give Trump greater control over monetary policy as well as the ability to fire Fed board members at will.

Speaking of, Fed chair Jerome Powell gave a press conference on December 18 during which he was asked about Trump’s vague plans for the government to establish a ‘strategic BTC reserve’ and whether Powell saw any role for the central bank to play in achieving this goal.

Powell responded by reminding the press that U.S. law prohibited the Fed from owning assets like BTC, and “we’re not looking for a law change. That’s the kind of thing for Congress to consider.”

The following day, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) took up this cause, saying she’d work to convince Congress to revise the Federal Reserve Act to allow the Fed to hold BTC. Lummis has introduced draft legislation that would authorize the federal government to spend whatever it took to acquire one million BTC tokens, funded in part by tapping America’s gold reserves.

The idea of the government using taxpayer funds to provide exit liquidity for BTC whales has massive support from, er, BTC whales like MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) founder Michael Saylor, who announced on December 23 that his company acquired another 5,262 BTC, bringing MSTR’s total BTC haul to 444,262 tokens.

But there’s also a growing chorus of reserve skeptics—including some notable crypto advocates on Capitol Hill—expressing their opposition to the fever dreams of BTC hodlers begging Uncle Sam to pump their bags. While many of these are generally hostile to all things crypto, some BTC maximalists are equally opposed, particularly if it involves the government acquiring additional BTC than the ~200,000 it already has.

D-day for Donald

There remains some debate as to whether Trump needs Congressional authorization to establish a BTC reserve, or whether he could simply issue an executive order to make it so. Trump has promised to issue a flurry of executive orders on ‘day one’ of his new administration (January 20), and hopes are high that some pro-crypto initiatives will be among this torrent of imperial decrees.

Absent Congressional approval, Trump could order the Treasury Department to buy BTC via the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), a Depression-era copy of British institutions tasked with foreign exchange intervention. The ESF could add BTC to its current supplies of dollars, gold and special drawing rights from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The ESF strategy has been helpfully offered to Trump by BTC-friendly groups hoping for an immediate bag-pump.

On December 23, Reuters reported on some of the other potential crypto goodies that hodlers hope will become law of the land in January by a simple stroke of Trump’s pen. Among these are the formal establishment of the aforementioned ‘crypto council’ and an order to traditional financial institutions to ensure unrestricted access to banking services (an order Fed banking bosses may or may not choose to observe).

Some observers expect Trump’s ‘day one’ executive orders to be less concrete and more aspirational guidance. This will almost certainly include a list of core principles for crypto regulation that Trump expects from agencies like the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Regardless of how long it takes, 2025 is shaping up to be a year unlike any that preceded it, at least in terms of the favorable regulatory inroads that digital assets expect to make. But to be on the safe side, crypto firms are reminding Trump that their ability to throw cash in his direction is basically unlimited.

Quid pro go-go-go

Following Trump’s 2016 victory, his inaugural committee set a then-record fundraising haul of $107 million, more than twice the previous record of $53 million raised by Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. But with still nearly a month to go until Trump’s next shindig, the total raised to date has already topped $200 million.

Among the crypto companies donating to this haul is another major 2024 campaign contributor, Ripple Labs, which gave the committee $5 million worth of its in-house XRP token. The Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) and Kraken exchanges each gave $1 million, while the Moonpay crypto payment processor gave an undisclosed amount. Vlad Tenev, CEO of crypto-friendly online brokerage Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD), told Fox Business that his company is planning to give $2 million to the committee.

Coindesk recently estimated the net worth gains that crypto firms and their Trump-whispering CEOs have enjoyed since November’s election. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has sold $437 million worth of his company’s shares since the election. These shares were worth $308 million prior to November 5, resulting in a $129 million windfall for Armstrong. His remaining shares in his company are now worth $6.4 billion, nearly $2 billion more than they were worth on November 4.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and a16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are believed to have enjoyed similar post-election surges in net worth, although the non-public status of their companies don’t offer the same insights as the Nasdaq-listed Coinbase.

The fact that these three companies have already pledged a combined $75 million+ to wield their campaign contribution cudgel in the 2026 midterm elections also suggests they don’t want this net worth bullet train to slow down anytime soon. Which it likely won’t, at least, assuming it doesn’t first go off the rails.

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