Donald Trump took the stage about an hour and a half delayed—the Secret Service wanted time to safe the room—however the viewers did not appear to thoughts. The as soon as and future president waited for Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” to come back to its rousing end, mouthed the track’s ultimate lyric, walked to the podium, and smiled. “Howdy Bitcoiners!”
Trump had arrived at the 2024 Bitcoin Convention in Nashville, looking for the help of a motion that after had appeared like a radical fringe however now was coming into the mainstream. “I stand earlier than you in the present day full of respect and admiration for what the bitcoin group has achieved,” the candidate stated.
Trump had as soon as appeared like a typical politician when opining on the subject. “I’m not a fan of Bitcoin and different Cryptocurrencies,” he tweeted in 2019, including that they are “not cash,” “extremely unstable,” “based mostly on skinny air,” and a device for ‘criminality.”
However on the 2024 marketing campaign path, he modified his thoughts. David Bailey, the CTO of Bitcoin, Inc. and organizer of the Nashville convention, met privately with Trump, and his marketing campaign began receiving important backing from pro-crypto tech titans, together with Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose enterprise capital fund a16z has staked billions on cryptocurrency and “Web3” startups, endorsed Trump as a result of the Biden administration’s regulatory insurance policies had been crippling their firms. That night time in Nashville, the Trump marketing campaign hosted a fundraiser with an asking price of $844,600 a head.
“I pledge to the bitcoin group that the day I take the oath of workplace, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ anti-crypto campaign might be over,” Trump advised the crowd. A month earlier, he had written on Reality Social that “Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin solely helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left. We would like all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!!”
In his first yr again in workplace, Trump did certainly reverse President Biden’s “anti-crypto campaign.” This felt like “a boot off the throat,” according to Andreessen. Trump freed Silk Road founder and bitcoin pioneer Ross Ulbricht. He named Sacks as his AI and crypto czar. His new Securities and Change Fee chief, Paul Atkins, launched “Project Crypto,” an initiative to offer the trade with regulatory readability. This summer time, the president signed the GENIUS ACT, which established a authorized framework for stablecoins, making them a device of U.S. financial coverage.
Past releasing Ulbricht, none of those insurance policies has a lot to do with bitcoin’s potential to separate cash from the state and to create “a brand new territory of freedom,” in the words of the know-how’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Certainly, Trump’s Justice Division has attacked builders who’re engaged on cryptographic methods to enhance bitcoin’s privateness.
The president does not wish to change the U.S. greenback; he desires to strengthen it. He hopes the greenback “dominates the future,” as he advised the crowd in Nashville. However bitcoin is designed to create an open world forex, the place governments and people are on equal footing. It is a borderless, voluntary financial community with no nationwide affiliation. One among the most well-known bitcoin memes exhibits two characters from The Matrix, with Neo asking Morpheus, “What are you attempting to inform me, that I can commerce my bitcoin for thousands and thousands sometime?” Morpheus responds: “No, Neo, what I am attempting to inform you is that whenever you’re prepared…you will not should.”
Stablecoins, against this, are a solution to broaden the greenback’s hegemony and community impact. Trump is not the bitcoin president. He is the stablecoin president.
Trump’s Nashville speech mentioned bitcoin interchangeably with “crypto,” however bitcoin is essentially completely different from different cryptocurrencies. It runs on a decentralized, peer-to-peer software program community and issuance schedule that, by design, cannot be tampered with by centralized authorities. It offers a solution to ship worth over the web with out trusting third-party intermediaries. Like the gold commonplace, it is a impartial financial system; in contrast to gold, it has no bodily properties, making it tougher to grab or censor. If bitcoin absolutely succeeds, governments will now not be capable of steal from their residents by printing cash, and so they’ll now not be capable of minimize individuals off from fee networks and banking companies.
“Crypto,” on the different hand, usually describes a set of centrally issued tokens, often administered by foundations, neobanks, and tech firms. Most “crypto” initiatives are outright scams or pyramid schemes; most have failed to seek out (or by no means regarded for) real-world adoption.
The main exception is “stablecoins,” which have emerged as the crypto trade’s killer software. They work like on line casino chips: a stablecoin firm points $100 value of digital greenback tokens and concurrently backs them with $100 of “high-quality” belongings, usually U.S. Treasuries. Stablecoins aren’t routed via the typical banking system, so that they transfer simply throughout borders and are readily accessible in components of the world the place the greenback is in excessive demand.
Stablecoins’ key innovation is not technical; it is regulatory arbitrage. They imply {dollars} for anybody, with no guidelines. Like bitcoin, they seem to be a quasi-permissionless, internet-native type of cash; in contrast to bitcoin, they depend on the U.S. greenback for his or her worth and are nearly solely administered by firms.
Stablecoins confronted regulatory headwinds underneath the Biden administration. The GENIUS Act, which Trump signed into regulation on July 18, 2025, has supplied the trade with a pathway to full compliance and broader use. For instance, Tether Holdings Restricted—which administers the top-ranked stablecoin when it comes to day by day exercise (USDT), with roughly $100 billion of worth shifting on its community day-after-day—was integrated in the British Virgin Islands and had introduced plans to relocate its headquarters to El Salvador. Its executives hadn’t visited the U.S. in years. However, in a putting change, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino joined Trump at the signing of the GENIUS Act, and he has announced that the firm will launch a U.S.-based, GENIUS Act–compliant stablecoin this yr.
When signing the regulation, Trump said that stablecoins are “actually strengthening the greenback, and giving the greenback nice prominence.” And he is proper. Stablecoins broaden Washington’s financial energy and attain by increasing the greenback’s community impact in dozens of nations and by serving to to shore up demand for U.S. debt. Stablecoins, which initially emerged as a novel know-how to facilitate bitcoin exchanges’ entry to greenback liquidity, have advanced right into a device of state energy.
For some individuals in and round the administration, stablecoins do not simply assist the U.S. Treasury; they assist their very own portfolios. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick is the former chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which “holds most of Tether’s $134 billion in belongings,” incomes “tens of thousands and thousands in charges,” in line with a 2024 article in The Wall Road Journal. The Trump household lately amassed $5 billion in paper wealth via its crypto enterprise, which features a stablecoin.
In March, Tether surpassed Canada and Taiwan to turn into the seventh-largest holder of U.S. Treasuries worldwide. “A thriving stablecoin ecosystem will drive demand from the personal sector for U.S. Treasuries, which again stablecoins,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent proclaimed in June. Tether has commonly promoted its position as a greenback booster to U.S. policymakers on television and social media. In 2024, solely J.P. Morgan and China bought more T-bills than stablecoin issuers.
Main monetary and fee companies firms are experimenting with stablecoins, together with Visa, which announced in August that it will help the PYUSD stablecoin, which works with Venmo and Paypal. Mastercard has introduced help for PYUSD, USDC, and some others. These firms are pushing not for bitcoin funds however for funds in a brand new type of greenback.
As early as 2018, thousands and thousands of individuals in Iran, Turkey, Nigeria, and Argentina started utilizing Tether as an “offshore” greenback that native authorities could not simply confiscate. With stablecoins, a refugee in a warfare zone can entry {dollars} simply as simply as a London financial institution. A recent study from ARK Make investments estimated that there are 200 million stablecoin holders, in comparison with a billion holders of paper {dollars}. As international locations like Russia and Iran try and coerce their residents into utilizing collapsing native currencies, the persons are more and more turning to stablecoins, that are arduous to ban.
There is important bitcoin adoption in authoritarian international locations and collapsing economies as properly, however many desire stablecoins to mitigate worth volatility. Stablecoins observe the greenback, whereas bitcoin floats. Like the greenback, stablecoins steadily lose worth over time, however they do not expertise wild worth swings.
This has turned stablecoins right into a humanitarian device as a result of they supply billions of individuals with a solution to escape excessive inflation. Why ought to anybody be compelled to make use of the Nigerian naira or Egyptian pound, which have collapsed by greater than 75 p.c in the previous few years, after they can entry a greenback stablecoin on their cell phone as a substitute? A former government of Binance, which points its personal stablecoin, was detained, abused, and practically killed in Nigeria. The federal government needed to ship a warning: Cease giving our individuals the means to bypass our authoritarian insurance policies.
However in contrast to bitcoin, stablecoins require customers to belief the firms that problem them. The tokens could be frozen, inflated, or remotely confiscated—and if the firm issuing them commits fraud, they will turn into nugatory. They’re a great tool, however they don’t seem to be in the identical class as bitcoin, which is basically freedom cash.
Stablecoins endure from the identical “root downside with typical forex,” to quote Satoshi Nakamoto: “all the belief that is required to make it work.” Bitcoin is really decentralized, that means there’s no one regulators can lean on to censor transactions. Tether, against this, has frozen and confiscated USDT transactions as giant as $225 million at the behest of U.S. officers, and the firm is open about cooperating with the FBI and Secret Service. Circle, the second-largest stablecoin issuer, does the identical.
Right this moment, stablecoin customers needn’t present ID. However you’ll be able to anticipate the trade ultimately to be folded into the monetary surveillance state. The U.S. authorities does not at present require that stablecoin customers adjust to Know Your Buyer (KYC) rules, which mandate that monetary establishments monitor suspicious exercise. However a future Democratic administration would possibly change that. Or what occurs if there is a high-profile case of somebody utilizing stablecoins for nefarious functions? Lawmakers may impose rules that require stablecoin customers to fill out figuring out paperwork, excluding billions of individuals.
What about bitcoin’s volatility downside? As the economist Lyn Alden argues in her 2023 e-book, Broken Money, the bitcoin worth will probably stabilize over time as extra individuals purchase it. The “extra liquid [bitcoin] turns into,” she writes, “the much less unstable it is more likely to be, which might make it just like gold in that regard.” In the meantime, stablecoins pegged to the greenback will probably turn into extra unstable as the U.S. authorities heads for a debt disaster. Finally, the Federal Reserve might be compelled to monetize debt issued by the Treasury to cowl trillions of {dollars} in upcoming bills associated to eldercare entitlements, navy expenditures, and different obligations.
If bitcoin turns into a steady unit of account, retailers will demand it as fee, obviating the greenback as an middleman forex. That can vindicate Morpheus’ response to Neo’s query about exchanging his bitcoins for thousands and thousands: “While you’re prepared, you will not should.”
However that transition would possibly not happen in our lifetimes due to stablecoins, argues former Bitcoin Journal Editor-in-Chief Mark Goodwin in The Bitcoin-Dollar: An Economic Monomyth. Bitcoin has elevated in worth in relation to the U.S. greenback by roughly 46,000 p.c over the previous decade, and this pattern is more likely to proceed. However stablecoins are rising as the major rail for buying bitcoin, which can enable the greenback to take care of its market energy for generations. Providers like Tether are cementing the greenback’s place as the major “infrastructural on-ramp to Satoshi’s protocol,” Goodwin argues, paying homage to the petrodollar system of the Nineteen Seventies, by which U.S. policymakers satisfied OPEC members to mandate that oil be bought internationally solely in {dollars}. As demand for bitcoin grows, the stablecoin trade will develop in tandem, creating further demand for U.S. Treasury debt and enabling the U.S. to proceed borrowing on a large scale to fund its expenditures.Â
Ultimately, via a turbulent course of referred to as “hyperbitcoinization,” Goodwin argues, fiat forex could also be solely changed and humanity may lastly arrive at a “truthful taking part in area.” However Trump’s embrace of stablecoins will sluggish that course of.Â
For the president, displaying up in Nashville was a chance to dump on Democrats, to lift cash for his marketing campaign, to launch his personal profitable crypto tokens, and to shore up the greenback by selling an trade that buys loads of Treasury debt. He is attempting to journey the bitcoin wave whereas championing a type of cash that retains the greenback dominant. It is logical. However so long as politicians maintain devaluing their currencies, deplatforming their residents, and debanking their critics, bitcoin will proceed rising inexorably.
