Investors hope the Trump White House will push an agenda that will attract the interest of major U.S. institutions that have so far remained on the sidelines.

Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist close to Trump, and Elon Musk, one of the new president’s biggest supporters, said the US is “now on the verge of a sensible crypto policy.”

During his campaign, Trump loudly touted Bitcoin’s benefits for the US economy, supported the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and even backed a new crypto startup backed by his sons.

Most of his inner circle is also pro-crypto. Vice president-elect J.D. Vance, cryptocurrency owner and co-chairman of Trump’s transition team, Howard Lutnick, heads investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where stablecoin giant Tether holds assets.

Mike Novogratz, the billionaire founder of crypto group Galaxy, said Trump’s win was “an incredibly important day for the cryptocurrency industry” despite supporting Kamala Harris’ campaign.

“We are at the very beginning of what I think will be 52 weeks with good news coming every week,” he added.

But the crypto industry also planned ahead. Efforts to build consensus for open crypto legislation in Washington have foundered under Democrats, as the EU, Singapore and other countries adopted their first rules on digital assets.

He has spent large sums of money trying to influence other political races to gain a friendlier audience in Washington, and he appears to have been successful.

A year ago, heavyweights like Coinbase, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and payments group Ripple Labs backed Fairshake, a political action committee targeting anti-cryptocurrency politicians, even though few of its ads mentioned digital assets. Its $170 million war chest has made it one of the largest corporate “Super Pacs.”

Among the $135 million scalpers spent this week was influential Ohio senator Sherrod Brown. Coinbase lobby group Stand With Crypto estimates that the number of pro-cryptocurrency politicians in Congress currently stands at 284 to 132. Fairshake announced that it has already raised $78 million for the 2026 midterms.

“Crypto has emerged as a powerful political force and one that will prevent unfair acts from occurring,” said Kristin Smith, managing director of industry group Blockchain Association. “This is an incredibly important moment; we have turned a corner,” he added.

But cryptocurrency’s biggest ambition is the policy change at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which chairman Gary Gensler has launched a full-scale attack on.

The industry’s biggest names, including Binance, Coinbase, Ripple and trading group Cumberland DRW, have faced lawsuits. Without explicit rules from Congress, the SEC relied on its own interpretation of existing securities laws and historical legal precedents. Crypto executives complained that it was impossible to follow the agency’s guidance and comply with its rules at the same time.

But they added that this is coupled with an approach in which the SEC has only limited interaction with targets before initiating legal actions. At a bitcoin conference in July, the crowd roared when Trump promised to fire Gensler on day one.

“You could replace Gary Gensler with almost anyone in the world and everything would be better,” said Alex Blume, founder of crypto investment advisor Two Prime.

Trump may find it legally difficult to remove Gensler, whose term ends in July 2026, because the SEC is an independent agency. Even so, Consensys senior lawyer Bill Hughes, who is facing a lawsuit this summer, hopes it will impose a “pause” on unresolved cases. “This is the SEC’s first and most important job regarding crypto assets, righting the many wrongs of previous leadership,” he said.

Amy Lynch, president of FrontLine Compliance and a former auditor of the SEC, said it is likely that the Trump administration will try to make the Commodity Futures Trading Commission the main market regulator instead of the SEC. “I suspect this will happen and there will be less control over crypto asset markets.”

“It will be a ‘risky environment’ that could lead to some major fraud cases,” he added, predicting fewer enforcement cases and faster resolution.

High on the industry’s wish list is reforming regulations on how banks must treat the digital assets they hold on behalf of their customers.

In 2022, the SEC quietly enacted a dry accounting rule stipulating that institutions holding digital tokens for their customers must treat them as liabilities on their balance sheets. Retained assets are normally accounted for as off-balance sheet items. Congress passed the repeal of this law in the summer, but it was vetoed by US President Joe Biden.

With Congress teetering on the brink of full Republican control, cryptocurrency executives hope they now have the numbers to scrap that rule and allow big banks and fund managers to enter the market.

“When you put BNYs and State Streets in charge, you will cause a tsunami of institutional participation,” Novogratz said.

Some promises can be hard to keep. Geoff Kendrick, an analyst at Standard Chartered, called the creation of a Bitcoin reserve fund a “low probability event.”

Blume cautiously noted the flagging success of the Trump family crypto project, which has sold only 5% of existing tokens to date.

But he added: “Candidates make a lot of promises when they run, and I hope (Trump) intends to follow through on those promises.”

© Financial Times