President Donald Trump was elected with the support of many big players in the cryptocurrency industry — and he is now paying them back in spades, CNN reported on Monday.
Ever since getting back in the White House, reported CNN's Steve Contorno, Trump "has upended the federal government’s wary stance toward cryptocurrency just as he said he would." For example, "Earlier this month, he signed an executive order directing the Federal Reserve to hold Bitcoin alongside gold — a move long sought by crypto advocates and once considered improbable."
David Bailey, a prominent Bitcoin investor who runs the crypto conference where Trump promised to support the industry last year, told CNN, “If a year ago you put me into hypnosis and said, ‘Describe to me your deepest dreams of what could happen,’ this would be straight-up fantasy. I never would have believed it could happen.”
For years now, Treasury officials have been wary of promoting cryptocurrency in this way because it is far less regulated than other, more mature kinds of securities like stocks and bonds, and the industry has in its early years been a breeding ground for fraud like illegal "pump-and-dump" schemes where a small circle of investors hype a coin to inflate the price, then cash out before the dip.
ALSO READ: 'Literally die': Social Security insider warns fraud obsession grinds whole agency to halt
Crypto is one of a number of areas where unconventional Trump backers have been handed large rewards, noted Contorno.
For example, he noted Trump formally recognized the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina, a group that recently became more supportive of the GOP, but has struggled for federal tribal recognition for decades due to opposition from other tribes. Similarly, Teamsters President Sean O'Brien outraged many union organizers by refusing to endorse the Democratic ticket as is common for the union, and Trump responded by choosing former Rep. Lori Chavez-Deremer (R-OR), one of the only Republicans to back a bill expanding union rights, as his Secretary of Labor — amid an administration that is otherwise vehemently hostile to unions.
But in the case of cryptocurrency, Trump's family appears to be invested in ways beyond the mere transactional political support. For instance, Trump family branded coins flooded the market just as the president took office, in a scheme that some observers have warned is a scam to make money off Trump's supporters, or perhaps even a vehicle for laundering foreign bribes to the White House.