U.S. President Donald Trump didn't write crypto policy. He didn't negotiate legislation or craft regulatory guidance. But without his sweeping demands from the White House and the pressure he's applied on his political allies in Congress, it's hard to imagine the industry would have had the several major successes it's celebrated during his first year back in office.

Between his first and second administrations, Trump made an astounding reversal in his early suspicions of digital assets, not only leaping aboard the sector's train, but demanding a role as its new conductor. The same president whose Securities and Exchange Commission (then under the leadership of former Chair Jay Clayton) once sued Ripple, effectively kicking off the regulation-by-enforcement approach to the sector arrived for his second term on a wave of pro-crypto campaign promises.

Trump has largely delivered on those promises, signing multiple executive orders that set an agenda for his regulators and Congress, and appointing regulators who would put pro-crypto policy work very high on their priority lists. The president said he'd make the U.S. the global leader for crypto, and his digital assets team promised a "golden age" for crypto. Trump ordered a comprehensive U.S. regulatory regime for digital assets activity and for stablecoin issuers. He also called for two crypto stockpiles as long-term federal investments, the first such "strategic reserve" in bitcoin BTC$90,873.03 and the second in every other token.

So far, that ambitious agenda is incomplete.

Trump was able to throw one big White House celebration when Congress managed to thread a difficult needle to get its stablecoin bill through the once-recalcitrant Senate, with Trump demanding that the House of Representatives sign off on the legislation without additional edits. The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act became the law of the land, with the president gabbing to a gathering of top crypto CEOs and his cabinet members in attendance.

It was clearly meant as an appetizer ahead of the main course: a bill that would clearly define how digital assets would be defined and how transactions with them would be overseen by the federal government.

That's where Trump's efforts have fallen short. While his allies managed to get a market structure bill to the floor of the House, where it passed with unusual cross-aisle support, it screeched to a halt in the Senate. Despite Trump's ambitious summer deadline, the Senate is where legislation has often gone to languish. The reasons are many, including its tighter access to floor time, that it usually demands a 60-vote, bipartisan majority to advance anything, and there's a greater ability for single members to throw wrenches into the works. It didn't help that Congress' failure to act on a budget slammed the doors on the federal government for weeks in the middle of the legislative talks.

Democrats have some significant complaints and points of worry in the draft bills unveiled in the Banking Committee and Agriculture Committee. Much of their attention is on consumer protection and the prevention of bad guys abusing the technology. But the most political and controversial pushback is focused on the president himself.

When Trump changed his mind about crypto, he jumped in with his whole wallet. He started cashing in personally on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) featuring him in various heroic scenes. He and his family steadily got into almost every other corner of the crypto and blockchain sector, with a stake in World Liberty Financial, a Trump-themed memecoin launched just before he took office, a family push into crypto mining and most recently with Trump Media & Technology Group preparing a leap into the prediction markets.The clearest expression of that fusion of public office and private upside is World Liberty Financial, the Trump-branded crypto venture that raised more than $550 million in a KYC token sale for its WLFI governance token even before he returned to the White House.

Public disclosures later showed Trump family members controlled roughly 22.5 billion WLFI, a stake valued at about $5 billion when the token began trading around $0.23 this fall. Since then, the project has tried to evolve from a memecoin with MAGA aesthetics into a serious DeFi and payments play, pitching WLFI as the political governance layer for its USD1 stablecoin and an incoming suite of “real-world asset” products.

Around WLFI, a full Trump-coin complex has taken shape. The $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins spent much of 2024 whipsawing on every campaign rally, policy headline and late-night TV monologue, briefly outpacing most of the altcoin market before giving back the bulk of their gains.

In June, Trump’s middle son Eric Trump said World Liberty Financial would take a stake in the TRUMP token itself, effectively binding the family’s flagship protocol to the most speculative corner of its own meme ecosystem and inviting comparisons to the FTX/Alameda loop.

There are almost no crypto roads untraveled by Trump, who has reportedly earned hundreds of millions of dollars from his digital assets ventures. Since he's also directing his administration's crypto policies, congressional Democrats have objected loudly to the apparent conflict of interest.

As recently as a Dec. 2 House hearing on banking regulation, Trump-appointed officials said they agreed with the rules prohibiting regulators and Fed board members from engaging in bank ownership or management to avoid conflicts. But when asked whether the same standard should be directed at a president controlling crypto policy when he has financial ties to the industry, they declined to answer.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee issued a report declaring the situation represented a "new age of corruption."

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt denied that there's any conflict of interest involving crypto at Trump or his family. "Through executive actions, supporting legislation like the GENIUS Act, and other common-sense policies, the administration is fulfilling the President’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans," she told CoinDesk in a statement.

The actions with the most immediate effect for the crypto industry, however, may have been Trump's appointments. Before this year, the industry widely saw former SEC Chair Gary Gensler as its chief governmental enemy. Gensler's SEC refused to write tailored crypto regulations and instead guided the industry through a slew of enforcement actions and court battles. But Trump's replacement for Gensler, Paul Atkins, launched "Project Crypto" and called its efforts — including policies around the tokenization of securities — his top priority.

Across the financial agencies, Trump installed regulators who are eager to meet the demands of his crypto orders. Their initiatives, such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's push to get regulated platforms to offer leveraged spot crypto products, are already underway, well before any future market structure bill can emerge from Congress.

"To achieve President Trump’s vision of making America the crypto capital of the world, the SEC must holistically consider the potential benefits and risks of moving our markets from an off-chain environment to an on-chain one," Atkins said in the speech that introduced Project Crypto. "President Trump has said that America is in its Golden Age — and under our new agenda, our crypto asset economy will be, too," he said.