Donald Trump Is Not the Bitcoin President
He’s the stablecoin president, seeking to expand the monetary power and borrowing capacity of the U.S. government.
Donald Trump took the stage about an hour and a half behind schedule—the Secret Service needed time to secure the room—but the audience didn't seem to mind. The once and future president waited for Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." to come to its rousing finish, mouthed the song's final lyric, walked to the podium, and smiled. "Hello Bitcoiners!"
Trump had arrived at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, seeking the support of a movement that once had seemed like a radical fringe but now was entering the mainstream. "I stand before you today filled with respect and admiration for what the bitcoin community has achieved," the candidate said.
Trump had once sounded like a typical politician when opining on the topic. "I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies," he tweeted in 2019, adding that they're "not money," "highly volatile," "based on thin air," and a tool for 'illegal activity."
But on the 2024 campaign trail, he changed his mind. David Bailey, the CTO of Bitcoin, Inc. and organizer of the Nashville conference, met privately with Trump, and his campaign started receiving significant backing from pro-crypto tech titans, including Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose venture capital fund a16z has staked billions on cryptocurrency and "Web3" startups, endorsed Trump because the Biden administration's regulatory policies were crippling their companies. That night in Nashville, the Trump campaign hosted a fundraiser with an asking price of $844,600 a head.
"I pledge to the bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' anti-crypto crusade will be over," Trump told the crowd. A month earlier, he had written on Truth Social that "Biden's hatred of Bitcoin only helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left. We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!!"
In his first year back in office, Trump did indeed reverse President Biden's "anti-crypto crusade." 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 Exchange Commission chief, Paul Atkins, launched "Project Crypto," an initiative to provide the industry with regulatory clarity. This summer, the president signed the GENIUS ACT, which established a legal framework for stablecoins, making them a tool of U.S. economic policy.
Beyond freeing Ulbricht, none of these policies has much to do with bitcoin's potential to separate money from the state and to create "a new territory of freedom," in the words of the technology's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Indeed, Trump's Justice Department has attacked developers who are working on cryptographic ways to improve bitcoin's privacy.
The president doesn't want to replace the U.S. dollar; he wants to strengthen it. He hopes the dollar "dominates the future," as he told the crowd in Nashville. But bitcoin is designed to create an open global currency, where governments and individuals are on equal footing. It's a borderless, voluntary monetary network with no national affiliation. One of the most famous bitcoin memes shows two characters from The Matrix, with Neo asking Morpheus, "What are you trying to tell me, that I can trade my bitcoin for millions someday?" Morpheus responds: "No, Neo, what I'm trying to tell you is that when you're ready…you won't have to."
Stablecoins, by contrast, are a way to expand the dollar's hegemony and network effect. Trump isn't the bitcoin president. He's the stablecoin president.
The Stablecoin President
Trump's Nashville speech discussed bitcoin interchangeably with "crypto," but bitcoin is fundamentally different from other cryptocurrencies. It runs on a decentralized, peer-to-peer software network and issuance schedule that, by design, can't be tampered with by centralized authorities. It provides a way to send value over the internet without trusting third-party intermediaries. Like the gold standard, it's a neutral monetary system; unlike gold, it has no physical properties, making it harder to seize or censor. If bitcoin fully succeeds, governments will no longer be able to steal from their citizens by printing money, and they'll no longer be able to cut people off from payment networks and banking services.
"Crypto," on the other hand, typically describes a set of centrally issued tokens, usually administered by foundations, neobanks, and tech companies. Most "crypto" projects are outright scams or pyramid schemes; most have failed to find (or never looked for) real-world adoption.
The major exception is "stablecoins," which have emerged as the crypto industry's killer application. They work like casino chips: a stablecoin company issues $100 worth of digital dollar tokens and simultaneously backs them with $100 of "high-quality" assets, typically U.S. Treasuries. Stablecoins aren't routed through the conventional banking system, so they move easily across borders and are readily accessible in parts of the world where the dollar is in high demand.
Stablecoins' key innovation isn't technical; it's regulatory arbitrage. They mean dollars for anyone, with no rules. Like bitcoin, they're a quasi-permissionless, internet-native form of money; unlike bitcoin, they rely on the U.S. dollar for their value and are almost entirely administered by companies.
Stablecoins faced regulatory headwinds under the Biden administration. The GENIUS Act, which Trump signed into law on July 18, 2025, has provided the industry with a pathway to full compliance and broader use. For example, Tether Holdings Limited—which administers the top-ranked stablecoin in terms of daily activity (USDT), with approximately $100 billion of value moving on its network every day—was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and had announced plans to relocate its headquarters to El Salvador. Its executives hadn't visited the U.S. in years. But, in a striking change, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino joined Trump at the signing of the GENIUS Act, and he has announced that the company will release a U.S.-based, GENIUS Act–compliant stablecoin this year.
When signing the law, Trump said that stablecoins are "really strengthening the dollar, and giving the dollar great prominence." And he's right. Stablecoins expand Washington's monetary power and reach by expanding the dollar's network effect in dozens of countries and by helping to shore up demand for U.S. debt. Stablecoins, which initially emerged as a novel technology to facilitate bitcoin exchanges' access to dollar liquidity, have evolved into a tool of state power.
For some people in and around the administration, stablecoins don't just help the U.S. Treasury; they help their 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 assets," earning "tens of millions in fees," according to a 2024 article in The Wall Street Journal. The Trump family recently amassed $5 billion in paper wealth through its crypto venture, which includes a stablecoin.
In March, Tether surpassed Canada and Taiwan to become the seventh-largest holder of U.S. Treasuries worldwide. "A thriving stablecoin ecosystem will drive demand from the private sector for U.S. Treasuries, which back stablecoins," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent proclaimed in June. Tether has regularly promoted its role as a dollar booster to U.S. policymakers on television and social media. In 2024, only J.P. Morgan and China bought more T-bills than stablecoin issuers.
Major financial and payment services companies are experimenting with stablecoins, including Visa, which announced in August that it would support the PYUSD stablecoin, which works with Venmo and Paypal. Mastercard has announced support for PYUSD, USDC, and a few others. These companies are pushing not for bitcoin payments but for payments in a new form of dollar.
As early as 2018, millions of people in Iran, Turkey, Nigeria, and Argentina began using Tether as an "offshore" dollar that local authorities couldn't easily confiscate. With stablecoins, a refugee in a war zone can access dollars just as easily as a London bank. A recent study from ARK Invest estimated that there are 200 million stablecoin holders, compared to a billion holders of paper dollars. As countries like Russia and Iran attempt to coerce their citizens into using collapsing local currencies, the people are increasingly turning to stablecoins, which are hard to ban.
There is significant bitcoin adoption in authoritarian countries and collapsing economies as well, but many prefer stablecoins to mitigate price volatility. Stablecoins track the dollar, while bitcoin floats. Like the dollar, stablecoins gradually lose value over time, but they don't experience wild price swings.
This has turned stablecoins into a humanitarian tool because they provide billions of people with a way to escape high inflation. Why should anyone be forced to use the Nigerian naira or Egyptian pound, which have collapsed by more than 75 percent in the past few years, when they can access a dollar stablecoin on their mobile phone instead? A former executive of Binance, which issues its own stablecoin, was detained, abused, and nearly killed in Nigeria. The government wanted to send a warning: Stop giving our people the means to circumvent our authoritarian policies.
But unlike bitcoin, stablecoins require users to trust the companies that issue them. The tokens can be frozen, inflated, or remotely confiscated—and if the company issuing them commits fraud, they can become worthless. They're a useful tool, but they aren't in the same category as bitcoin, which is essentially freedom money.
How Bitcoin Prevails
Stablecoins suffer from the same "root problem with conventional currency," to quote Satoshi Nakamoto: "all the trust that's required to make it work." Bitcoin is truly decentralized, meaning there's nobody regulators can lean on to censor transactions. Tether, by contrast, has frozen and confiscated USDT transactions as large as $225 million at the behest of U.S. officials, and the company is open about cooperating with the FBI and Secret Service. Circle, the second-largest stablecoin issuer, does the same.
Today, stablecoin users don't need to provide ID. But you can expect the industry eventually to be folded into the financial surveillance state. The U.S. government doesn't currently require that stablecoin users comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations, which mandate that financial institutions monitor suspicious activity. But a future Democratic administration might change that. Or what happens if there's a high-profile case of someone using stablecoins for nefarious purposes? Lawmakers could impose regulations that require stablecoin users to fill out identifying paperwork, excluding billions of people.
What about bitcoin's volatility problem? As the economist Lyn Alden argues in her 2023 book, Broken Money, the bitcoin price will likely stabilize over time as more people acquire it. The "more liquid [bitcoin] becomes," she writes, "the less volatile it is likely to be, which would make it similar to gold in that regard." Meanwhile, stablecoins pegged to the dollar will likely become more volatile as the U.S. government heads for a debt crisis. Ultimately, the Federal Reserve will be compelled to monetize debt issued by the Treasury to cover trillions of dollars in upcoming expenses related to eldercare entitlements, military expenditures, and other obligations.
If bitcoin becomes a stable unit of account, merchants will demand it as payment, obviating the dollar as an intermediary currency. That will vindicate Morpheus' response to Neo's question about exchanging his bitcoins for millions: "When you're ready, you won't have to."
But that transition might not occur in our lifetimes because of stablecoins, argues former Bitcoin Magazine Editor-in-Chief Mark Goodwin in The Bitcoin-Dollar: An Economic Monomyth. Bitcoin has increased in value in relation to the U.S. dollar by approximately 46,000 percent over the past decade, and this trend is likely to continue. But stablecoins are emerging as the primary rail for acquiring bitcoin, which may allow the dollar to maintain its market power for generations. Services like Tether are cementing the dollar's place as the primary "infrastructural on-ramp to Satoshi's protocol," Goodwin argues, reminiscent of the petrodollar system of the 1970s, in which U.S. policymakers convinced OPEC members to mandate that oil be sold internationally only in dollars. As demand for bitcoin grows, the stablecoin industry will grow in tandem, creating additional demand for U.S. Treasury debt and enabling the U.S. to continue borrowing on a massive scale to fund its expenditures.
Eventually, through a turbulent process called "hyperbitcoinization," Goodwin argues, fiat currency may be entirely replaced and humanity could finally arrive at a "fair playing field." But Trump's embrace of stablecoins will slow that process.
For the president, showing up in Nashville was an opportunity to dump on Democrats, to raise money for his campaign, to launch his own lucrative crypto tokens, and to shore up the dollar by promoting an industry that buys a lot of Treasury debt. He's trying to ride the bitcoin wave while championing a form of money that keeps the dollar dominant. It's logical. But as long as politicians keep devaluing their currencies, deplatforming their citizens, and debanking their critics, bitcoin will continue growing inexorably.
