David Yaffe-Bellany
Appearances
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
You can think of it as the kind of technology equivalent of the Trump Hotel, the Trump Hotel on the blockchain. You know, it's a new avenue for people to get close to Trump, to kind of show their loyalty to Trump. And it poses as clear a conflict of interest as any in the kind of Trump business portfolio. And why did Trump change?
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So Trump himself has given a series of different explanations for it. But the one that he seems to mention most often is that his sons, including Barron, are really interested in crypto and that they're constantly in his ear about this exciting new technology and how important it is for the U.S. to embrace it. So that's the sort of official explanation.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
But I think it's clear to anyone who's paying attention to the crypto industry that the sheer amount of money the industry was spending on politics got his attention. And that it also gave crypto executives a level of access to him that they'd never had before and an ability to try to change his mind. Hmm.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
You've got crypto executives donating millions of dollars to the Trump campaign, crypto companies inviting Trump to speak at their events, individual executives kind of courting people in Trump's orbit to try to get meetings with him. It becomes this sort of full court press and a kind of industry-wide embrace of the Trump candidacy.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Not only does Trump win, but the candidates that the crypto super PAC supported also overwhelmingly win. The vast majority of them win their races. In total, various crypto groups have proclaimed that hundreds of pro-crypto candidates across the Senate and the House were elected.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
You know, famously, there was this early experiment to kind of prove how Bitcoin could be used, where a guy went onto an internet forum and said, I'll send 10,000 Bitcoin to somebody in an exchange, send me $40 worth of pizza. And that exchange happened. and somebody was paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So this is really a kind of astonishing political victory for the crypto industry, an industry that was kind of out in the political wilderness before the election. And it's these political victories that are the other main driver of the surge in Bitcoin's valuation that we've seen recently. The pro-crypto candidates won. They owe a debt of gratitude to the industry.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And that sets the crypto industry up in an entirely new way in Washington, giving it just a whole new level of influence.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So there are a couple of key people who are going to have important roles in the Trump administration who are big crypto backers. The first one is a guy named Howard Letnick.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
who runs an investment bank called Cantor Fitzgerald. He's run it for many years. And he's a huge Bitcoin booster. And his bank for a long time has had a business relationship with a very important crypto company called Tether.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And Lutnick was appointed by Trump as co-chair of the presidential transition team, which is a super important role. He essentially was overseeing the selection of personnel throughout government.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Exactly. So that in and of itself was a huge boost for the crypto industry.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Lutnik himself was picked by Trump to be Commerce Secretary, a kind of important role in economic regulation in the cabinet. So that was the first kind of big personnel win for the crypto industry. But the part of the new administration that crypto was most fixated on was the SEC, the nation's main financial regulator.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And it's the agency that had been going after crypto companies in this Gensler era, launching all of these lawsuits. And the person that Trump has chosen to lead the SEC is an experienced securities lawyer named Paul Atkins.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Atkins is not some like crazy fringe pick. He's really respected in the legal community, but he's also a crypto backer. He has consulted for crypto companies during his career in the private sector. And crucially, he served on the advisory board of one of the largest crypto trade groups.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Fast forward to this year, and suddenly that is the most expensive dinner in the history of the world.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
There is a huge amount of enthusiasm in the crypto world when he was selected.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So those two key personnel selections, Letnick and Atkins, added to the various Trump family members who are outspoken about crypto.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Eric Trump was just at a big Bitcoin conference in Abu Dhabi talking about how much he loves Bitcoin. You know, that's just generated a huge amount of optimism in the crypto world.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Just one Bitcoin now is worth over $100,000. Ooh, so do the math for me. Actually, wait, what is it? So that's a $1 billion pizza order right there.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Absolutely, a crypto cabinet, a crypto Congress, and a crypto policy wish list that just seems to get longer and longer day by day as the industry grows more confident about getting what it wants. I think the top of that wish list is that these lawsuits that the SEC has been filing against big crypto companies get dropped.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And that's something that the industry is hoping happens very early in the new administration.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
In theory, yes, he's running the agency. The agency is bringing these suits and he could shut them down. It's unlikely to happen immediately, but I think at the very least, we're likely to see way fewer new suits. And I think some of those big cases that Gensler filed could disappear or get settled very quickly. So that's on the kind of the SEC front.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
There's also legislation that the crypto industry wants, and that has the potential to really shape the industry for the long term. Because, you know, we could always have a new SEC chair in four years or eight years who adopts the Gensler approach. But legislation could really kind of cement the industry status in Washington. Right.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And one thing that the crypto world has been pushing for is a bill that would essentially shift...
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
regulatory control of the industry from the SEC, which is this aggressive enforcement agency, to a separate financial regulator called the CFTC for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is much smaller, much less aggressive, and generally considered by the crypto world to be a kind of better, friendlier regulator.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Yeah. And, you know, this is a 15-year time horizon. I mean, you know, this isn't like centuries and centuries. If you look at all the Bitcoin in circulation, the total value of those Bitcoin is about $2 trillion. And that's more than the combined worth of MasterCard, Walmart, and JPMorgan Chase. So that just gives you a sense of the scale of this.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Yes, exactly. But the crypto wish list actually goes on even further than that. And it includes things that just a year ago would have sounded like the most ridiculous pipe dream for the industry. So one that's getting a lot of attention is that the crypto world wants the U.S. government to create what they call a Bitcoin strategic reserve.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And this is actually something that Trump talked about on the campaign trail and said he would do.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So I'll start with the caveat that nobody's exactly sure what this is. But, you know, from the reporting that I've done and what people have said publicly, it sounds like what the crypto world is talking about is a stockpile of Bitcoin owned by the U.S. government. The same way that the U.S. government has gold sitting in a vault, it would have its own Bitcoin sitting in a digital wallet.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And you can see why this is appealing for people in the crypto industry who are invested in Bitcoin. Because if the U.S. government suddenly starts buying huge amounts of Bitcoin, then the price will go up and those crypto investors will get richer. And the announcement of the creation of the stockpile would send all sorts of positive signals to the market and cause the price to go up further.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So that's where the arguments get a lot harder to understand and the logic starts to become a little bit tenuous. But I'll do my best to kind of articulate what the best version of the argument is. And essentially, it's that Bitcoin is a great investment. Look how much it's gone up in the last 15 years. Look how much it could go up in the next 15 years.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And profits from that investment could be used by the U.S. government to chip away at the national debt. You know, we might not have to raise taxes if the government's just sort of coasting along on its Bitcoin investment profits. So those are the sorts of arguments that the crypto industry is making. There's also a kind of geopolitical argument. You know, right now the world runs on the U.S.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
dollar. And so when the U.S. wants to kind of push around its geopolitical rivals, it can do that with economic sanctions. But in a hypothetical future world that isn't run on the dollar, that's run on cryptocurrencies, it might help the U.S. to have this huge stockpile of Bitcoin. How exactly would that work? I don't know. But that's the argument.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
You know, in theory, Bitcoin's at about $100,000 today. Let's say it reaches a million 10 years from now. That's a 10x return for the U.S. government. And potentially, those profits could be reinvested in some way, and then the U.S. wouldn't have to keep borrowing huge sums to offer all the services that are expected from the government. And, you know, the U.S.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
could do all that and pay down the debt without raising taxes on the rich crypto entrepreneurs who are trying to have vacations in Bermuda or whatever. Yeah.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Well, for a minute, I'll just try to channel what the crypto industry would say to that question, which is that for years, people have complained, you know, this stuff is useless. It doesn't do any of the amazing things that we were promised. And the industry has come back and said, our hands are tied by these regulators. They're essentially trying to create a system where we can't operate legally.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And so we haven't even really had an opportunity to to showcase the amazing potential benefits of cryptocurrency. Well, now the shackles could come off. In theory, there's an opportunity here for the crypto industry to prove that this stuff actually is useful, that it can create economic benefits for Americans beyond just the kind of short-term high of seeing your Bitcoin shoot up in value.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And, you know, what it essentially shows is that Bitcoin has been one of the most successful financial products of the last 20 years and that this industry is succeeding, at least in terms of the market, in a way that it hasn't even in the past when you've seen headlines about people getting rich from Bitcoin.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Yeah, this is a degree of regulatory capture that is really concerning to a lot of people, especially advocates for consumers, people who think that it's important for the government to have a strong hand to stop abuses in the business world. The crypto industry is now being regulated by by people the crypto industry chose. And there's something fundamentally dangerous there.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
You know, in the past, we've had this kind of roller coaster experience with crypto. There have been high highs and low lows and big crashes, but it's all happened outside the existing financial system. The victims of previous crypto crashes have often been wealthy people who were kind of gambling on the speculative asset that went up and down and who were prepared for the potential consequences.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
But in this dangerous new scenario, and with those shackles off, crypto has an opportunity to make itself a cornerstone of American finance. And a crash in that world, in a post-Trump crypto world, could be so much more damaging to so many more people than it ever has been in the past.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So there are two main drivers behind this, and the first one will be familiar to listeners of the show who've followed our coverage over the years. And it all comes back to this obscure court case that played out about a year ago.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
On one side, you had the crypto industry, which wanted to offer a new investment product that would basically just make it easier for people, regular people, to invest in Bitcoin. On the other side, you had the US government, which wanted to stop that from happening. They didn't want the US investing public to have more exposure to the crypto markets.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
In that court battle, the crypto industry won, and it was a huge game changer for the industry. It meant that ordinary people had a type of access to crypto investments that they'd never had before. And in some ways, it kind of brought crypto into the mainstream of the US economy. You know, it allowed people to have their retirement accounts invested in crypto.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And it brought a huge amount of new money into the Bitcoin world, sending the price of Bitcoin higher and higher.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Absolutely. Federal regulators in Washington were concerned that people would be exposed to the volatility of the crypto world, that their savings could disappear. There were wider concerns about how crypto companies were behaving financially. whether they were sort of revealing the right type of information to the public about these kind of risky financial assets that they were offering.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And what the Feds wanted to do was kind of protect the wider economy from the craziness and volatility of this fringe boom and bust crypto world. And the person who was at the center of that effort to kind of protect the U.S. economy was a guy named Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Gensler was essentially trying to kind of partition crypto away from the U.S. economy. And the way that he was doing that was insisting that crypto should be regulated like Wall Street.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
He said that, you know, crypto companies should have to reveal to their investors the sort of basic details of how these companies operate so that people would know what they were getting into, essentially, what they were putting their money into. And he did that through a campaign of enforcement. He was filing lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit against the biggest crypto companies.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And he essentially became the sort of bait noir of the crypto industry. You know, every company was getting these notices saying the SEC is coming after you.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Absolutely. I you know, the FTX crypto exchange going under that was really bad for crypto investors, but it didn't have a particularly sizable effect on the rest of the economy. People who hadn't chosen to risk their money in the kind of crypto casino were more or less spared any of the harm of that. And Gensler and other U.S.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
regulators wanted to ensure that that stays the case in future kind of crypto crises.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
The crypto industry responded with just a torrent of anger. You had basically every crypto executive going on Twitter, saying things like, Gensler is the devil incarnate. You know, you can't really overstate the level of vitriol that was directed toward this regulator. Of course, for regular people, that was easy to ignore. It was just executives kind of sounding off on Twitter.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
But behind the scenes, crypto was asserting itself in a much more aggressive and important way. Industry leaders were starting to get organized, organized in a way they'd never been before.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
They were putting together a political spending machine, raising money in advance of the 2024 election campaign, where the industry would go on to spend huge amounts to support congressional candidates across the country who support crypto, who think that it's a valuable technology that could actually boost the U.S. economy in the long term.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
It's not completely new. You know, listeners might remember Sam Bankman Freed. He was that kind of tousled haired chief executive of the FTX crypto exchange who was a big star in business and politics for a while until it turned out that he was stealing billions of dollars from his customers.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Exactly. And is now serving a 25 year sentence. So he's not on the scene anymore. And, you know, in any case, the political spending that he was doing was sort of haphazard. It wasn't kind of driven by a unified strategy. It was really organized by him rather than by a kind of coalition of companies.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
But what we ended up seeing in 2024 was a coalition of crypto companies working together really closely and really strategically to pour a huge, honestly unprecedented amount of money into politics. They created a brand new super PAC called FairShake. which spent a total of about $130 million in the 2024 campaign cycle, supporting more than 50 congressional candidates around the country.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And that amount of spending is one of the most audacious, aggressive spending sprees by any industry in the post-Citizens United era of American politics. It's a huge deal, not just for crypto, but honestly in the history of money in politics in the United States. And at a high level, the objective was to create the most pro-crypto Congress in U.S.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
history, to fill seats with people who had advanced crypto policy goals. But obviously, there were particular races that were especially important. And one great example that kind of crystallizes the stakes of this for the crypto industry was the Ohio Senate race, which pitted Sherrod Brown against Bernie Moreno.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
The stakes were so high because Sherrod Brown, the incumbent Ohio senator, longtime Democrat, was chair of the Senate Banking Committee, which is a kind of super important committee in the legislative process for financial regulation. And Brown was also, you know, a crypto skeptic.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So you had this kind of powerful anti-crypto figure in the Senate. And his opponent, Bernie Moreno, is sort of the opposite.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
I mean, a Bitcoin booster who'd actually founded his own crypto company and on the campaign trail, you know, talked relentlessly about how much he loved crypto. The industry spent $40 million on that race, you know, to try to boost Bernie Moreno's candidacy. And Moreno won. Another key race was the Democratic Senate primary in California.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
The industry spent a huge amount of money trying to tank the candidacy of one of the Democrats running for that slot, Katie Porter. The reason they went after her is because Porter is a close ally of Elizabeth Warren, the liberal Democratic senator who's also been an outspoken critic of crypto.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So you can see how the industry was kind of both trying to boost people that they liked and also take down vocal critics of the crypto industry. In California, Katie Porter lost, and that sent a really strong message about the power of the crypto industry.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Absolutely. It's the oldest corporate strategy in American history. But it's still a little surprising coming from the crypto industry because, remember, this industry originated as this kind of renegade libertarian force in American economics. It wanted to be something different, to redefine how business was done in the United States.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
But it's evolved significantly over the last 15 years to the point that it's now kind of another big money industry. It's playing at the big boy table with big pharma, big oil, those other kind of classic political spenders.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Well, in addition to spending all this money on congressional races, they're targeting the most important and influential political figure in the country, and that's Donald Trump.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
So obviously, it's impossible to predict the future, especially where cryptocurrency is concerned. But it's certainly the case that this new surge in the crypto world is different from ones that we've seen in the past. And let me put this into perspective for you for a second. Bitcoin was created about 15, 16 years ago, essentially out of thin air. It was worth nothing.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Yeah, Trump didn't say much about crypto in his first term. And on the rare occasions that he did talk about it, he was uniformly negative. He tweeted about its volatility, about its association with criminal behavior, and he just spoke plainly about how much he didn't like it.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
In 2021, he called into Fox Business and suggested that Bitcoin was a scam, that it was designed to undermine the U.S. dollar.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
He just didn't hide that skepticism. He made his preferences clear in all sorts of ways. In fact, toward the end of his first term, the SEC under Trump actually brought one of the very first major enforcement lawsuits against the crypto industry. So that was the kind of Trump first term attitude toward crypto.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
But then something happened this year in, you know, early to mid 2024 on the campaign trail.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
Suddenly, Trump started talking about crypto in a different way. He started saying that he loved it.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
He made a now very famous appearance at the annual Bitcoin conference in Nashville in July, where he said that if the United States doesn't embrace crypto, then China will.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And he promised to turn the U.S. into the crypto capital of the planet.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
And he vowed to get rid of Gary Gensler, the kind of arch-villain of the crypto world.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
But his pivot on crypto, and it's really a transformation on crypto, crystallized this fall when Trump announced that he is starting his own crypto business, which he calls World Liberty Financial.
The Daily
Crypto’s Big Bet Is Paying Off
What is that? It's still pretty sketchy what World Liberty Financial actually is. But what Trump has said publicly is that it's going to be a crypto platform. It's going to enable people to do things like borrowing and lending with cryptocurrencies. And there's even a new digital currency associated with it called WLFI for World Liberty Financial. And it's available for purchase.