On Monday morning, the research firm Bernstein came out with some advice about crypto for its Wall Street clients: “Buy everything you can.” Ever since the invention of bitcoin 15 years ago, this would be the kind of bloodshot, crazy-eyed call you could ignore because it was coming from a fanatic. But Bernstein is not some crypto-pilled boiler-room operation. Rather, it is part of the staid French investment bank Societe Generale and traces its history back to the 1960s, when the U.S. was still on the gold standard. The paper immediately ricocheted around the finance industry. 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 sheer volume of trading, it was probably crypto’s biggest day ever.
Welcome to crypto’s Donald Trump era. It has hardly been a week since Trump won election, but it looks increasingly likely that the next four years in cryptoland are going to make the time when Sam Bankman-Fried was the industry’s fuzzy-headed mascot appear tame by comparison. What happened? It is not that there was some mass conversion event among Wall Street’s most cynical moneymen to the utopian promises of the digital future. There has been no new invention, no new use discovered that would make bitcoin or any other digital currency more likely to be a part of your everyday life. The calculus here is that all the insanity of the pandemic-era boom can come back in force — and this time, like Trump, the industry is emboldened to get even bigger, richer, and more unabashed than it ever has before.
There’s no guarantee that bitcoin, or any other digital token, will be worth more tomorrow than it is right now. Volatility and sky-high risk is a central part of investing in crypto, and that didn’t change on November 6. But crypto in 2025 is looking like it is the industry’s best chance to make itself into something bigger than just a financial sideshow — for the next four years, the industry is absolutely looking to make itself institutional. The coming Trump economy, if it looks anything like the last one, is going to be very good for business, with lower taxes and interest rates, freeing up more money for people to speculate. And the industry has already made it as easy to buy crypto as anything else available on the New York Stock Exchange. Which, broadly speaking, has meant more money coming into the space, bringing rising prices and dampened volatility. Ever since this winter, when regulators allowed 401(k) money to flow into bitcoin ETFs, giants like BlackRock have been acting as a bridge between the traditional and digital worlds of finance — which has, in turn, only served to make crypto that much larger.
The biggest break from the Biden administration, though, is likely going to be how much the industry is going to police itself. That is at least partly a function of an extremely aggressive lobbying campaign. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase — the largest U.S. crypto exchange — made a wager that he could marshal more than $100 million from his industry to elect a crypto-friendly government — and he ended up with a historic streak of wins that rivals some of the all-time great Wall Street trades. Bloomberg tallies that out of the 48 races where crypto money was backing a candidate, the industry has won every single won. (There are eight remaining, and all but three seem to be breaking toward the industry). Washington, D.C.’s most powerful bulwarks against the industry, including Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown and Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, are losing their jobs. The winners, like Brown’s successor Bernie Moreno, are openly pushing for crypto to get the laissez-faire treatment. One senator, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, has introduced a bill that would require the Treasury to buy and hold onto a “strategic reserve” of 1 million bitcoins for 20 years — putting the U.S. more in line with El Salvador, which has tried, and mostly failed, to integrate the asset into everyday life.
It’s not just lawmakers. Howard Lutnick, who is overseeing Trump’s personnel staffing, is the CEO of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald — which just happens to be where Tether, the lifeblood stablecoin of the crypto industry, keeps its money. Elon Musk, who bankrolled at least $119 million of Trump’s get-out-the-vote operations, is a major crypto proponent — especially the joke dogecoin — and Tesla owns vast stores of bitcoin. (His vow to oversee a Department Of Government Efficiency to root out public spending is, I am sorry to say, a crypto joke).
Of course, the first Trump administration oversaw a wild crypto bull market in 2017 and, at the time, prosecuted plenty of scams and frauds. What the crypto industry complains the most about these days is that the federal government doesn’t make crypto-specific rules, and that it uses the courts to set policy. Nevermind that this practice originated under Trump, back when he wrote he was “not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.” But since July, when Trump promised at the annual bitcoin conference to ax Gensler and make the U.S. the global center of crypto, his late-in-life conversion was accepted by the industry without much of a second thought.
This is essentially what Bernstein and many others on Wall Street are excited about: putting money into a relatively new asset class now that regulators and federal prosecutors seem ready to let it grow. Coinbase and MicroStrategy, a tech company that holds $10 billion in bitcoin, went vertical on Monday. The total market for all of crypto was within a breath of reaching $3 trillion — about the size of France’s economy. In fact, the only digital asset to lose money among the largest 100 was Monero — a cryptocurrency favored by the likes of North Korea because it is so useful for laundering large sums of money. (The first Trump administration had prosecuted a multi-decade low of white-collar crimes, after all, so it’s not clear that money laundering would be much of a priority.)
Last year, the Bloomberg journalist Zeke Faux (who’s a friend of mine) published a book called Number Go Up about the various scams and frauds that crypto facilitates. The title of the book comes from a quote by Dan Held, an executive at a crypto exchange, who was quoting — in earnest, apparently — a sarcastic meme about crypto. “Number go up technology is a very powerful piece of technology,” he said, according to the book. “It’s the price. As the price goes higher, more people are aware of it, and buy it in anticipation of the price continuing to climb.” Of course, what he’s describing has paved the way for many of the Ponzi-esque schemes that have defined the crypto industry so far, not least of which was the collapse of SBF’s crypto empire. (Not for nothing, FTX, his exchange, was based in the Bahamas, which has notoriously hands-off and crypto-friendly laws. They’ve since backtracked.) Crypto’s doubters have continued to make the same case against it over and over again: that digital assets make for a slow and expensive form of money, and that their best use is either in speculation or crime.
Perhaps, over the long run, all this speculation will make for another FTX-like crash — this one even bigger than the last one. But for now, the crypto bros are going to go absolutely ape.
