The battle to run King Donald's crypto court

Trump will be the first president to fully embrace digital currencies- and he's already anointed his crypto princes

- PAUL ARMSTRONG AND JONATHAN PRYNN

Even by the standards of an extraordinary presidential handover it was a jaw dropping demonstration of Trumpite chutzpah at its most shameless. Just days before taking the oath in the US Capitol's Rotunda, the man elected to be the 47th holder of the world's most powerful office unveiled his own cryptocurrency meme coin called, inevitably, $Trump. Then, just to ram home the point, on the eve of the inauguration his wife followed with $Melania. By the time Donald Trump succeeded Joe Biden the two coins were valued at billions of dollars.

It was the final clinching evidence, if indeed there had been doubt, that Trump will be the first crypto president, a commander-in-chief who is also cheerleader-in-chief for the still turbulent and volatile world of digital currencies.

But it was not always so. As recently as 2021 the then ex-president Trump derided Bitcoin, the oldest and biggest of the cryptocurrencies, as a "scam" that he did not like because "it's another currency competing against the dollar".

But by the time of the election run-in Trump was obsessed by the industry, surrounding himself with a court of hugely wealthy crypto-bros of whom by far the most visible, and richest, the Richelieu to Trump's King Louis XIII, was, and remains, Elon Musk himself. The new direction of travel was clear by last summer when Trump famously unleashed a keynote address at the Bitcoin 2024 convention in Nashville in July when he promised to make the United States the "crypto capital of the planet", create a Bitcoin "strategic reserve" and promised to ensure that all Bitcoin is mined in America. No surprise then that the price of Bitcoin shot up to new highs in the weeks after the election, smashing through the $100,000 mark.

Part of the reason for the remarkable U-turn is simply that the world has moved on, massively, since those disparaging comments made to Fox Business just four years ago. Crypto has come out of the shadows and is going mainstream.