President-elect Donald Trump is expected to take executive action on bitcoin and cryptocurrency on his first day in office, according to a Monday report from the Washington Post.
A source involved in Trump’s transition team communications said the executive orders might address debanking, a matter Melania Trump raised in her 2024 memoir, as well as the repeal of a policy requiring banks to count the digital assets they hold as liabilities on their balance sheet.
“The Trump team has made it very clear that this is a priority,” the source said.
The latter policy, the repeal of SAB121, has been campaigned for by MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, one of the leading figures in the field. He has suggested that repealing SAB121, in addition to the advent of spot ETFs and fair value accounting, could send Bitcoin’s market capitalization to $100 trillion.
Decrypt additionally reported Monday that the president-elect’s first crypto executive order would likely establish a presidential crypto council consisting of approximately 20 industry leaders and that the action would be “the first of many” related to the crypto industry.
The Monday reports coincided with a large spike in bitcoin’s price, from $90,700 to over $99,000 over the next couple of days.
Trump has selected a number of pro-crypto appointees for his second administration, including David Sacks as the first-ever crypto czar, Paul Atkins for Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, Howard Lutnick for secretary of commerce, and Scott Bessent for treasury secretary.
The president-elect has also put crypto proponents Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency.
A number of states have proposed creating their own bitcoin strategic reserves, something Trump proposed the United States should do at a national level. If the U.S. does create its own bitcoin strategic reserve, economists have said it could trigger a crypto “arms race.”
|Washington Post