FILE - Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference July 27, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is promising to make America the “crypto capital of the planet” if he returns to the White House. Fulfilling that promise would likely pay off for him personally.
“Taking a pro-crypto stance is not necessarily troubling; the troubling aspect is doing it while starting a way to personally benefit from it,” said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.Cryptocurrencies are forms of digital money that can be traded over the internet without relying on the global banking system.
During his time in the White House, Trump said he was “not a fan” of cryptocurrency and tweeted in 2019, “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” Trump has also talked about subsidizing the use of Bitcoin mining in order to increase energy production and has vowed to block the creation of a Federal Reserve-administered Central Bank Digital Currency — which is a digital form of central bank money that would be available to the public. While it is still in exploration, many crypto advocates oppose a centrally run digital currency.
While the White House issued an executive order on digital assets in 2022, no substantive laws have been passed by Congress or written into regulation by the White House. Stockton said the lack of clarity of written rules by the Biden administration, as well as the SEC’s heavy-handed enforcement on crypto firms through a series of lawsuits, indicates “there’s no clarity and there’s selective and arbitrary enforcement of regulations.