Sunday, May 25, 2025 | 2 a.m.
Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
The Venetian Convention and Expo Center will host the world’s largest bitcoin conference next week. While the cryptocurrency community has gathered in Las Vegas before, this year’s event carries new political weight with the Trump administration’s prominent attendance.
Vice President JD Vance, Trump’s two eldest sons, and White House “crypto czar” David Sacks are all scheduled to appear.
At last year’s conference in Nashville, Tenn., Trump championed bitcoin — a decentralized digital currency operating on blockchain technology — while criticizing what he considered regulatory overreach under the Biden administration. His remarks drew thunderous applause from the crowd of crypto enthusiasts.
Justin Doochin, head of events at the company that puts on the yearly conference, said Trump’s policy on bitcoin has been “a lot more favorable” so far. Trump has reallocated seized bitcoin for a “strategic reserve,” installed friendly regulators and revoked Biden-era policy.
“That’s what’s getting everyone excited: him tweeting about it, him talking about it, him adding it to his campaign,” Doochin said. “Putting it on the forefront of U.S. policy is extremely bullish for the crypto community.”
Doochin said the event will have a strict policy on sticking to bitcoin, a technology that Elisa Cafferata, who’s lobbied for blockchain legislation in Nevada, explained derives its value from its transparency and a cap on how many bitcoins can be created.
“Because it’s harder and harder to create new ones, it’s, by design, supposed to go up in value,” Cafferata said. “It was meant to hold value. It was meant to be a way to send money around the world without going through intermediaries like banks that charge you a transaction fee.”
With unprecedented government interest, the convention’s industry day will feature programming exploring how bitcoin — alongside other emerging sectors like AI and space travel — intersects with public policy under the theme “Code and Country.”
Doochin noted that conference attendees have become far more politically engaged, a shift he traces back to 2023 when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, spoke at that year’s convention.
Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency represents a dramatic reversal. In 2021, he dismissed bitcoin as a scam threatening the U.S. dollar.
Hilary Allen, a self-described “crypto critic” and professor of law at American University, said that “in the second administration, (Trump) realized that he could be the one profiting.”
Just days before his second inauguration, the Trump-connected firm World Liberty Financial launched a Trump “meme coin” — a purely speculative category of cryptocurrency that typically has no utility.
And while it wasn’t announced until April, this one came with a catch: the top 220 owners get a private dinner with the president. Those who attended the dinner Thursday night spent around $148 million on the coins, according to USA Today.
“When you create most types of crypto, you are creating a digital asset out of thin air,” Allen said. “Any money you receive from them you can pocket. So it really is a way for people to give money for nothing to the Trump family should they so desire.”
Asked Thursday if the White House would release a list of those attending the dinner, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it wasn’t a White House event and that Trump is attending on “his personal time.”
“The president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable,” she said later. “It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country.”
Las Vegas resident Ben Horowitz — half of the partnership behind venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest crypto investors in the world — said on a podcast last July with his business partner that “the future of technology” was at stake with the election.
Horowitz’s partner, Marc Andreessen, said Trump’s platform was a “blanket endorsement” of their industry: ending the “unlawful and un-American crypto crackdown,” defending the “right to mine bitcoin” and opposing a digital currency coming from the Federal Reserve.
The pair donated a combined $67 million to the pro-crypto Fairshake PAC, according to OpenSecrets, though the committee supported both Democratic and Republican candidates last year.
Just under half of all corporate spending in the 2024 election came from the crypto industry, left-leaning consumer rights group Public Citizen found.
Trump has followed through on that agenda Andreessen praised. At the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it’s been “night and day” since Trump took office, Allen said
Now, the commission has a crypto task force designed to provide regulatory clarity, something the crypto industry maligned the Biden administration for lacking. But along with that, other regulators backed off their ongoing work.
“There were other things they lost on, but the fundamental issue of whether crypto assets were securities, the SEC just kept on winning” in court before Trump retook office, Allen said. “You get a leadership change at the SEC … and these lawsuits were just dropped, dropped, dropped.”
One of those companies that had its case dropped is Coinbase, a crypto exchange platform in Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio which added former Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita to its advisory board in January. Former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., also joined.
They’re just two examples of what Allen described as a “revolving door” between government and industry lobbying. She also pointed to Summer Mersinger, who recently announced her move from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to CEO of a major Washington crypto trade association.
Despite the ongoing entanglement between crypto and the GOP, not all Democrats are against the new technology.
The Senate this month advanced industry-backed legislation around “stablecoins,” a type of cryptocurrency pegged to another asset, such as gold, or currency. The GENIUS Act, which got the support of 16 Democrats to get past the 60-vote Senate threshold for cloture, would provide some regulatory framework for the coins and create reserve requirements for issuers.
Both of Nevada’s Democratic senators voted in favor, with a spokesperson for Sen. Jacky Rosen telling the Sun that “cryptocurrency is an emerging industry that is in need of regulation.”
“Sen. Rosen voted to advance bipartisan legislation to open the door for regulating cryptocurrency. This bill is not the only action Congress should take on crypto regulation, but it is an important step to protect consumers and support America’s innovation,” the spokesperson wrote.
Allen doesn’t see things the same way. She believes that the legislation only legitimizes a portion of the industry that’s been fraught with abuse. World Liberty Financial, too, has its own stablecoin, other Democrats have worried.
“Other than fear of running afoul of the crypto industry’s money cannon, I find it hard to see why Democrats are supporting this legislation,” she said. “The legislation essentially blesses stable coins, creating … a greater market for them.”
[email protected] / 702-990-8923 / @Kyle_Chouinard
