A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
President Trump has become a major booster of digital currency. That's helped the industry and his own bottom line. Our Planet Money podcast looked into how the president's crypto enthusiasm plays out inside the industry. Here's Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz
ILYA MARRITZ, BYLINE: The Bitcoin 2025 conference at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, the biggest event of the year for bitcoin, the oldest and most established cryptocurrency. It's where we met Stephen Dalehite (ph), a lawyer from San Antonio.
STEPHEN DALEHITE: My wife is into it big time, and I'm the one that's like, that's just pie in the sky.
MARRITZ: But Stephen started to think his wife might be right.
DALEHITE: And I'm saying, if Trump gets elected, it's going to go up.
MARRITZ: The price of a single bitcoin did go up from about $60,000 to over a hundred thousand, and Stephen is thinking about getting in.
ANDREA BERNSTEIN, BYLINE: Bitcoin used to be an outsider thing. Government's stay away. But this year...
FRANK CORVA: A lot of politicians are here.
BERNSTEIN: Frank Corva is Bitcoin Magazine's White House correspondent.
CORVA: I think bitcoin is no longer a countercultural thing. It is now just a part of the mainstream. It's part of the political process. The vibe has shifted.
BERNSTEIN: It began even before Donald Trump took office when he named a crypto czar, a partner at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm named David Sacks. At the conference, Sacks brought a list of accomplishments.
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DAVID SACKS: So much that's happened in the last hundred days - I have to pull out my cheat sheet. I hope that's OK.
BERNSTEIN: First item.
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SACKS: On the president's first full day in office, he pardoned Ross Ulbricht.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah.
SACKS: So that was...
BERNSTEIN: Ulbricht was given two life sentences for operating Silk Road, an online drug bazaar that ran on bitcoin.
MARRITZ: Trump also created a strategic bitcoin reserve, like a pile of gold, but bitcoin. His law enforcement agencies called off crypto investigations and lawsuits. Vice President JD Vance's message from the stage.
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JD VANCE: We reject the Biden administration's legacy of death by a thousand enforcement actions.
MARRITZ: The crypto industry is feeling good. Paolo Ardoino is the CEO of Tether, which makes a kind of crypto called stablecoin.
PAOLO ARDOINO: We have some good conversations with the Trump administration. We have good conversations with lawmakers.
BERNSTEIN: Trump's actions as president have helped his family business. In the past year, new Trump crypto ventures have added a billion dollars to Trump's net worth, Forbes says. During the conference, Donald Trump Jr. said even Trump's media company is raising millions to buy bitcoin.
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DONALD TRUMP JR: That's a pretty big deal, right? I mean, you know, there's not a lot of people that have done something that big or shown that level of commitment.
BERNSTEIN: The White House told us, President Trump's, quote, "assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest."
MARRITZ: Take all of this in contrast to the previous administration's relationship to crypto. Amanda Fischer worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Biden. She stressed that crypto represented about 20% of all complaints to the SEC, that regular people are being taken in by hype.
AMANDA FISCHER: I think that there are a lot of people who rightly feel like work doesn't necessarily translate to wealth these days, and there is a ton of marketing around the cryptocurrency industry that promises people that if they're just clever enough, they can be rich.
BERNSTEIN: Just this week, Trump's media company told the SEC it plans to set up a new consumer-facing crypto investment fund. This came just after Trump's SEC loosened rules for just that kind of fund.
MARRITZ: Ilya Marritz.
BERNSTEIN: Andrea Bernstein, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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