The crypto industry got what it paid for

The crypto industry is beginning to see a return on one of its most prescient investments: Donald Trump. On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed three bills that industry supporters believe will bring more legitimacy and predictability to the digital currency space — and that critics warn could enrich the president’s own family and hand too much power to the industry at the expense of stability in the financial system. With the summer recess looming, there’s a limited amount of time to pass two of the bills that still require a Senate vote, but one is already headed to Trump’s desk. Crypto Week, as House Republicans took to calling it, didn’t go as smoothly as hoped, with some hardline Republicans blocking a procedural step to advance the bills earlier on in the week. But after the president had “a short discussion” with them, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was able to secure the necessary votes to move the bills forward. That kind of sway is exactly what crypto executives — who poured tens of millions into Trump’s election, loudly proclaimed their support for him, and contributed to his inaugural fund — paid for. After a four-year struggle with the Biden administration over crypto policy, the industry is finally seeing the US government adopt policies it’s long asked for. “We are getting incredibly close to finally having clear rules for crypto to grow this industry in the United States of America,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on X after the passage of the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts. Summer Mersinger, CEO of the crypto industry group Blockchain Association, called the GENIUS Act’s bipartisan passage “a watershed moment for digital assets in the United States.” The GENIUS Act was already passed by the Senate and now heads to the president’s desk to be signed into law. The bill creates a regulatory framework for stablecoins, or digital currency tied to the value of the US dollar. Bipartisan supporters see it as a positive step to create guardrails for a burgeoning industry, but some Democrats who opposed the bill fear it would help funnel new investment into an area in which Trump’s own family has a direct stake through World Liberty Financial. The other two bills, the CLARITY Act and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, still need to be approved by the Senate. The latter would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC), which could compete with existing digital currencies but whose skeptics think could be used for government surveillance. The CLARITY Act would outline rules around when digital assets could be treated as securities regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or a commodity regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This distinction was a sore point for the crypto industry during the previous administration, to the point where previous SEC Chair Gary Gensler was lambasted as a symbolic bogeyman for all of crypto. Trump successfully courted crypto money for his campaign on the promise that he would fire Gensler, and now the industry is seeing high dividends on this investment. They’ve gone from an era in which they were embattled by independent agencies to having the president himself help get industry-favorable legislation over the finish line.