On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: As Donald Trump prepares to take office on January 20th, the cryptocurrency world awaits with bated breath. Not only has the president-elect promised to make America the “crypto capital of the planet,” he’s welcoming several devotees into his new administration. And as far as popularity goes, crypto has never had more fans. Bitcoin, by far the most popular among other cryptocurrencies, passed the $100,000 mark for the first time just last December. Could this be the year crypto goes mainstream, taking its place beside the US-backed dollar as the global currency to watch? Laura Shin, crypto journalist, and host of the Unchained podcast, joins The Excerpt to help us understand how a new Trump administration might impact the cryptocurrency market. (Note: This interview was recorded prior to the recent $TRUMP meme coin release.)
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to the Excerpt. I’m Dana Taylor.
As Donald Trump prepares to take office on January 20th, the cryptocurrency world awaits with bated breath. Not only has the president-elect promised to make America the “crypto capital of the planet,” he’s welcoming several devotees into his new administration. In the new role of AI and crypto Czar not subject to Senate confirmation, Trump has trapped legendary crypto investor, David Sachs. And as far as popularity goes, crypto has never had more fans. Bitcoin, by far the most popular among other cryptocurrencies, past the $100,000 mark for the first time just last December. Could this be the year crypto goes mainstream, taking its place beside the US-backed dollar as the global currency to watch? Here, to help us understand how Trump 2.0 might impact the cryptocurrency market is Laura Shin, a former senior editor at Forbes, crypto journalist and host of the Unchained Podcast.
Thanks for joining me, Laura.
Laura Shin:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn in tomorrow. What has he revealed about his plans for cryptocurrency?
Laura Shin:
Trump has made a number of promises to the crypto community. He has called himself the first crypto president, and this is, frankly, quite a turnaround from his first administration. But this time around, he has made numerous promises. One of them he has kind of already accomplished in that he had promised to fire Gary Gensler, who is currently the SEC chair, but is soon to be stepping down. And that was probably one of the biggest wins for the crypto community because Gary Gensler was perceived as being one of the major roadblocks to the industry growing here in the US.
But Trump has made numerous other promises such as to create a crypto council with which he will establish clear regulation for the industry. He promised to do that within the first 100 days. I don’t know if he’ll be able to deliver on that timeline, and frankly, because the crypto industry was a major financial force in the elections, supporting candidates on both sides that were pro-crypto, that it is looking more likely that finally Congress will pass legislation for the industry.
And there were a few other smaller promises. One of them is interesting in that he promised that the US government would not pursue what’s called a central bank digital currency, which is a currency that uses blockchain rails as the technology behind it that is issued by the Central Bank, such as in the case of the US, the Fed. Those are just some of the biggest promises that he made.
Dana Taylor:
Trump previously called cryptocurrency a scam, but last year, he and other members of the Trump family launched their own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. What led to his dramatic shift regarding crypto?
Laura Shin:
There’s a little bit of backstory to this. As you mentioned, and as I mentioned earlier, Trump was not a fan of Bitcoin previously in his first administration. And then, in the year of 2022, there was a collapse of a large crypto exchange called FTX, and the founder of that had been somewhat active politically, at least in donations. He was publicly known for donating to Democrats, but secretly also using other people on his team to funnel donations to Republicans. People should know in case they haven’t heard the story already, that it turns out he was using the money from customers that customers had put into his exchange for a lot of these donations. This exchange had been one of the biggest exchanges, and frankly, Sam Bankman-Fried himself had a positive reputation in the crypto industry. At that point, the technology and that whole industry became a little bit more politicized by regulators and by officials here in the US.
And so there was this turn against the industry, particularly by Democrats. And so at that point, what happened was that when it came time for the election, because crypto people were feeling very victimized by a lot of Democrats, and so by that point, because there was a lot of negative sentiment around that, and simply because also at that point, I think it had been five or six years really, that the industry had been wanting regulation specifically for crypto, something that would create clear rules so they would know what was legal for them to do and what was illegal for them to do and the administration just had not been delivering. So I think Trump basically saw the opportunity to pick up some votes and realized there’s a very disaffected community here and I can appeal to them.
And so frankly, I think it’s that political calculus, plus also he has his own children who some of them, as far as I understand, have gotten very much into crypto. I think that is part of what led to them wanting to participate and to launch World Liberty Financial.
Dana Taylor:
The incoming chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Paul Atkins, is expected to adopt a more cryptocurrency friendly tone than his predecessor. Who are some of the big players in crypto who are now headed to Washington DC with Donald Trump?
Laura Shin:
We’ll start with Paul Atkins because, as I mentioned, that SEC chair position really was just one of the major focuses of the crypto community. Paul Atkins is very well respected. He had actually previously worked at the SEC. He’s very much liked establishment Republicans. He’s also very pro-crypto people generally in DC are looking forward to having him as chair even for reasons that are softer reasons.
You mentioned the crypto and AIs are David Sachs. He’s an interesting pick because, yes, he has invested early in certain different crypto companies and in Bitcoin. There’s one other key position around crypto that is going to be the CFTC chair, basically one other complaint that the crypto industry had these years when, like I said, they were practically begging for some clear regulation on what was legal for them to do and what was not legal for them to do.
What the SEC in particular, but also the CFTC a little bit were doing as part of their way of regulating this industry was something called regulation by enforcement. And what that means is they were taking laws that were on the books before crypto was created and applying them, but since it was never clear how they applied, sometimes entrepreneurs would be caught off guard to find out that actually they had broken this or that rule.
Dana Taylor:
Crypto is nothing if not volatile. There was a lot of noise when the value of Bitcoin surpassed $100,000 in 2024. What was the significance of that?
Laura Shin:
I’ve been covering crypto for almost 10 years, and when I started, Bitcoin was just a little bit over $200. People at that time talked about how the software had been coded in such a way where there would never be more than 21 million Bitcoins. And it would be explained to me that this is similar to how the island of Manhattan has a fixed size and it’s going to become very valuable real estate. And certainly that has played out in the sense with Bitcoin where from that rise, and really a few years before I started covering Bitcoin, it was just pennies, frankly. But what has happened is that during that time, there have been more people who have learned about it, who have found it valuable. I would imagine that there are a number of Americans listening to this who they might be skeptical.
I have found in my reporting that people who live in other areas where they don’t have either strong currencies or strong financial systems, they tend to understand the promise of crypto and Bitcoin a lot more easily than I think people who are just born in a world where all of this works really well. In 2024 was the fact that Bitcoin ETFs were finally approved. And so with the ETFs, what that meant basically is that now bigger financial investment companies can invest in Bitcoin, and frankly, everyday people who just want to put it in their tax advantage account like retirement accounts, they were able to access it as well. And that’s just a whole new spigot of money. And so those were some of the factors that pushed it above a 100K this past year.
Dana Taylor:
I know a little bit about cryptocurrency, but take me to school here. Can you briefly break down blockchain technology and how decentralized financial systems compare to centralized institutions or simply how it came to be and what does it represent to crypto enthusiasts?
Laura Shin:
Yeah. I’m sure most people know that the way the banking system works is that, let’s say that I pay you $20, my bank will have to record a debit on my account, and then your bank will put the credit on your account. And so there’s two different ledgers that have to be updated and then reconciled to make sure that they’re both reflecting the same transaction accurately in both ends.
The way that Bitcoin works, this is just a very simplified version, but imagine that we all live in a village, and the way that our village’s financial system works is that we gather in the town square every day at noon, and we call out all the transactions that we’ve had in the past 24 hours. The way it would work is that every single villager would keep their own ledger. We’d all write down these transactions, and let’s say one day I’m sick and I don’t update mine. Now there’s one ledger that’s different from the others. We would decide that there isn’t one single ledger that’s the correct ledger. We would decide that the “correct ledger” is the one in the cloud, the one that the majority of the ledgers represent. And so what we would say is that there’s no one bank, basically. It’s just that we’re all participating and at any given moment, whatever is the majority is the accurate representation of the ledger.
And so with Bitcoin, instead of having these people, these villagers, it’s instead these computers that are running the Bitcoin software all over the globe, and that’s why any person can participate.
Dana Taylor:
Critics of cryptocurrency describe it as everything from pure folly to a Ponzi scheme. You mentioned the 2024 case against cryptocurrency exchange FTX founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, who’s now serving 25 years in prison. What kinds of things should people be aware of when investing?
Laura Shin:
What you don’t want to do is to just buy something because you heard from somebody else that it was good to buy. I’m sure you’ve heard this adage, do your own research, and it’s very true with crypto because since… As I explained with this whole decentralization aspect, this is something very new and different from other types of financial assets that we are used to. It really takes people a while to really grasp what that means and how these types of assets act differently from other assets, how to protect them differently, how you can lose them, but also how people can pull the wool over your eyes into thinking that this is something good and it’s actually not.
So what I would counsel people to do is maybe simple things like just try using the technology just to further your understanding of it before you “invest.” So you could think to yourself, okay, I have spent 200 bucks on a cooking course. Before you could say, I’m going to create my own course, spending $200 doing different tasks in crypto, sending a payment to somebody, minting an NFT, buying a meme coin. One other thing that I would say is, before you “invest,” you need to understand how to keep them secure because there have been numerous instances where people didn’t understand that crypto is like digital cash. And by that, what I mean is if you lose it, you’re not going to get it back unless somebody sends it back to you. A lot of transactions that we’re used to like credit card, they’re what are called pull transactions, and the bank, which is a centralized entity in between that you as the sender and the other recipient, they can claw that money back. But when you send crypto, because it’s basically peer to peer, the other person basically has to send it back to you.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, Laura, what will you be watching for in 2025 from both the world of cryptocurrency in this new Trump administration?
Laura Shin:
Frankly, what has happened during these years when there was not clear regulation for crypto and the regulation by enforcement strategy was pushing a lot of entrepreneurs out of the US, as a journalist, I cover the space as neutrally as I can, but as an American, I was getting a little bit worried about the US’s ability to stay at the forefront of technology. Obviously, with the internet, we have been on the leading edge. All the major technology companies, the internet companies, they’re all US companies, and there’s some pride in that. Watching what’s been happening in crypto, it really felt like, oh, all these entrepreneurs are leaving and all these other jurisdictions are getting all this talent. And in fact, when you try to use some of these crypto things, they’re saying like, “Oh, there’s a saying on the website,” people in your jurisdiction are blocked, basically.
I am excited for the fact that ever since the election, now there have been numerous entrepreneurs who have been saying that they’re moving back to the US or they’re moving their offices here. It really gives me hope because people might be aware that the semiconductor industry got sent offshore, and now the US is trying to play catch up.
Dana Taylor:
Laura, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Laura Shin:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistant. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I’m Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.