Photo: Jon Cherry/Getty Images

On Monday morning, research firm Bernstein offered some crypto-related advice to Wall Street clients: “Buy everything you can.” Since Bitcoin’s invention 15 years ago, this would be the kind of bloody, wild-eyed call you might dismiss as coming from a fanatic. But Bernstein is not a boiler room operation filled with cryptocurrencies. Rather, it is part of the French investment bank Societe Generale and its history dates back to the 1960s, when the United States was still on the gold standard. The newspaper immediately jumped into the financial sector. When I started writing this column, Bitcoin was testing new highs above $82,000; By the time I finished it had eclipsed $88,000. When you look at the trading volume you probably crypto’s biggest day ever.

Welcome to the Donald Trump era of crypto. It hasn’t even been a week since Trump won the election, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the next four years in the cryptocurrency world will look tame compared to the era when Sam Bankman-Fried was the industry’s fuzzy-headed mascot. What happened? There has been no mass conversion to the utopian promises of the digital future among Wall Street’s most skeptical money men. There has been no new invention or new use discovered that would increase the likelihood of Bitcoin or other digital currencies becoming a part of your daily life. The calculus here is that all the frenzy of the pandemic-era boom may come into force again — and this time, like Trump, the industry is emboldened to be bigger, richer and more shameless than ever before.

There is no guarantee that Bitcoin or any digital token will be worth more tomorrow than it is now. Volatility and very high risk are a central part of investing in crypto, and that didn’t change on November 6. But in 2025, crypto looks like the industry’s best chance to transform itself from a financial sideshow into something bigger. Over the next four years, the industry is definitely trying to improve itself institutional. The next Trump economy, if it is anything like the last one, will be very good for business; With lower taxes and interest rates, it will give people more money to speculate. And the industry has made buying crypto as easy as anything available on the New York Stock Exchange. This generally meant more money coming into the space, rising prices and reducing volatility. Since this winter, when regulators allowed 401(k) money to flow into Bitcoin ETFs, giants like BlackRock have served as a bridge between the worlds of traditional and digital finance, which has only served the crypto to gain so much. bigger

However, the biggest break from the Biden administration will probably be how much the industry will monitor itself. This is at least partly a function of the extremely aggressive lobbying campaign. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, took a bet that he could raise more than $100 million from his industry to elect a crypto-friendly government and ended up with a historic winning streak that rivals some. The best Wall Street trade of all time. Bloomberg tallies Of the 48 races in which cryptocurrency supported a candidate, the industry won every single one. (There are eight left, and all but three appear to be heading into the sector). Washington, D.C.’s strongest bulwarks against the industry, including Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown and Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler, are losing their jobs. Winners like Brown’s successor Bernie Moreno are openly pushing crypto to achieve laissez-faire treatment. A senator from Wyoming named Cynthia Lummis introduced a bill that would require the Treasury to purchase a “strategic reserve” of 1 million bitcoins and hold it for 20 years; this brought the United States more in line with El Salvador. mostly failedintegrating presence into daily life.

Not just lawmakers. Howard Lutnick, who oversaw Trump’s hiring, is the CEO of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald. Tether, the stablecoin that is the lifeblood of the crypto industry, he hides his money. At least the funding is Elon Musk $119 million Trump, one of Trump’s get-out-the-vote operations, is a major proponent of cryptocurrency (particularly the joke dogecoin), and Tesla has large bitcoin warehouses. (A promise to control something) Department of Public Efficiency eradicating public spending is, I’m sorry, a crypto joke).

Of course, the first Trump administration presided over a wild crypto bull market in 2017 and filed numerous fraud and fraud lawsuits during that time. The crypto industry’s biggest complaint these days is that the federal government doesn’t set crypto-specific rules and uses the courts to set policies. Never mind this app origin In the Trump era, when he wrote he was “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money and are highly volatile in value and created out of thin air.” But since July, when Trump fired Gensler at the annual bitcoin conference and promised to make the United States the global hub of cryptocurrency, his late-life transformation has been accepted without much thought by the industry.

That’s essentially what Bernstein and many on Wall Street are excited about: putting money into a relatively new asset class as regulators and federal prosecutors now appear ready to let it grow. Coinbase and MicroStrategy, a technology company Holds $10 billion in Bitcoin, went vertical On Monday. The total market for all cryptocurrency was close to reaching $3 trillion, the size of the French economy. Actually the only digital asset to lose Monero was the most preferred cryptocurrency among the top 100 currencies like North Korea because it is very useful for laundering large amounts of money. (First Trump administration sued White-collar crime is at its lowest level in a decadeUltimately, it’s not clear whether money laundering will be a priority.)

Last year, Bloomberg journalist Zeke Fake published a book called (He’s My Friend). Number Is Increasing About the various scams and frauds facilitated by crypto. The book’s title comes from a quote by Dan Held, an executive at a crypto exchange, who quotes him – apparently seriously. sarcastic meme about crypto. “Number augmentation technology is a very powerful technology,” he said, according to the book. “This is the price. As the price rises, more people become aware of this and buy with the expectation that the price will continue to rise.” Of course, what he described paved the way for many of the Ponzi-like schemes that have defined the crypto industry thus far, most notably the collapse of SBF’s crypto empire. (Not for nothing, Its exchange, FTX, has since been headquartered in the Bahamas, which has hands-off and crypto-friendly laws. traced back.) Cryptocurrency skeptics have continued to make the same argument over and over again: that digital assets are a slow and expensive form of money, and that their best use is either speculation or crime.

Maybe in the long run, all this speculation could lead to another FTX-like crash; This one is even bigger than the last one. But for now, cryptocurrency brothers will definitely look like monkeys.