| Digital-asset enthusiasts spent the months since Donald Trump's barnstorming July speech at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville pre-emptively celebrating his pledges to the industry: that if elected president, he'd fire their nemesis Gary Gensler; create a federal stockpile of Bitcoin; and make crypto great again.
Instead Gensler resigned, effective as of Inauguration Day — a day which featured a flurry of executive actions but not a single one about crypto or Bitcoin. Nor did any crypto executives appear in the prime seating alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk.  Photographer: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo It had already been a rough weekend for crypto fans. While a select few were celebrating in Washington at the "Crypto Ball" on the Friday before inauguration, the incoming US leader launched an "official" memecoin — branded TRUMP, of course. On Sunday, after her husband's memecoin had attracted billions of dollars in trading volumes, Melania Trump debuted a namesake token of her own.
It was a move that provoked confusion and dismay even from crypto true believers. Rob Hadick, general partner at crypto-focused venture-capital company Dragonfly Capital, described the launches as " a blight that we will have to work to put behind us as builders." Government watchdogs, meanwhile, deplored potential conflicts of interest.
Exchanges including Binance and Coinbase said they would be listing the Trump token and on Tuesday, REX Financial and Osprey Funds filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an ETF trading the memecoin.
The SEC, for its part, has sought to draw a line between the new regime and the Gensler era. Crypto-friendly commissioner Hester Peirce will lead a new task force to "help the Commission draw clear regulatory lines, provide realistic paths to registration, craft sensible disclosure frameworks, and deploy enforcement resources judiciously," according to a press release titled "SEC Crypto 2.0".
In Davos, Switzerland, Wall Street executives sporting suits and snow boots tried desperately to direct attention away from the memecoins and toward their own digital asset efforts, while industry insiders sought to revise expectations for an executive order on crypto from "day one" to "soon".  Post on X by David Bailey, CEO of Bitcoin Magazine. At least there's DOGE: some folks took heart from the appearance of a certain famous Shiba Inu — a canine closely associated with dogecoin — on the official website for Elon Musk's so-called Department for Government Efficiency. The US DOGE Service, the newly renamed federal agency that will house Musk's cost-cutting effort, did not immediately comment on the new federal web site. |
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