Trump’s Crypto Presidency: What It Means For You

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

Before we start today, I wanted to do something.

I want to say thank you.

Thank you for believing that the individual actions that we can take that sometimes feel too small for the moment can actually work.

Across this country, more and more of us are reclaiming the fact that the government is supposed to work for us.

From the mail carrier to the National Park custodian to members of Congress and yes, to the people in the White House.

They work for us.

And your commitment to calling, to emailing, to showing up is making a difference.

Of course, a handful of awkward town halls will not stop this wholesale assault on our national integrity, but it's an important marker and it's an important start.

It's one that says we won't be silent and we won't go away.

Because we have to remember, politicians have recognizable triggers.

They respond to money, peer pressure, and attention.

We're going to talk about money in a minute, and peer pressure has to come from within their ranks.

But we can bring attention to their complacency.

We can bolster their courage, and we can remind them that a job review is coming up in 2026.

So thank you for what you've done, and let's keep at it.

Let's keep insisting.

Now, to the issue of money.

With Trump's second administration, we are seeing an escalation of the grotesque self-enrichment that marked his first term and his post-presidency, and it's what got him there in the first place.

From foreign dignitaries spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at his Washington, D.C.

hotel during sensitive moments in their relations with the United States, to a post-presidency hawking products like Bibles, sneakers, cologne, and profiting from his massive stake in his own social media company, there has been no shortage of efforts to use his status to line his pockets.

And it's by no means a new phenomenon.

And Trump is not singular, nor is he solely responsible for ushering in this political era of state capture, of mixed messages, of money buying power.

But he is normalizing a more crooked world.

We see this in the way he profits off of his position and doesn't even try to hide it anymore.

You may remember his commercial that blasted through network television stations in the thick of the presidential election, one that peddled his limited edition watches that could be yours for the low, low price of $100,000.

But what he left out in the ads and what he forgets to tell us is that these watches are crypto-themed and can only be purchased using Bitcoin.

This isn't the first time that Trump has leaned into his unofficial role as the crypto president.

A day before Trump took office, he attached his name to a crypto token, also known as a meme coin, that he called, not surprisingly, the Trump coin.

Negative points for originality.

But this move was immediately followed by the launch of First Lady Melania Trump's meme coin, and the crypto ventures didn't stop there.

But what has befuddled millions, including a lot of you listening today, is what exactly is crypto?

How does it work?

And how is Donald Trump scamming America in a whole new way?

We'll get into all of this and more during today's episode, including the ways that other people with skin in the game are benefiting from having Trump on their side.

There's a reason that multiple billionaire investors with crypto ties donated millions of dollars to his presidential campaign and funded dozens of congressional races.

While some applaud the president for embracing digital currency and pushing it mainstream, many of us are rightfully confused, skeptical, or both.

So this week, we're doing a deep dive into crypto to explore the good, the bad, and the gray areas.

And as always, we'll talk about where you, the listener, come in.

To accomplish all of that, we're excited to be joined by two extraordinary guests, Zeke Fox, who is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Business Week, and Annie Lowry, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic covering politics and economic policy, both of whom will be here to help demystify crypto right here on Assembly Required.

Zeke Fox, Annie Lowry, welcome to Assembly Required.

Thanks, Stacey.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Well, I'm delighted to have you here to explain the very vague notion of crypto and why we should care.

And so in order to do that, I'm going to start with a few establishing questions for Zeke before we bring you in, Annie.

So Zeke, you've been an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Business Week for 15 years, and you wrote a book on cryptocurrency called Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Ride and Staggering Fall.

It is safe to say that you are an expert on digital currency.

So here's the basic question.

Is crypto real money?

Certainly some people treat it like it is.

But I mean, the original idea for crypto was that it would be kind of this like decentralized money that would live on the internet and that people would use it for buying and selling like everyday items.

Like maybe one day you'd use Bitcoin to pay for your coffee.

And

Bitcoin has actually been around since, you know, the beginning of my career.

It's as old as WhatsApp.

Uber,

and all sorts of things that have become part of everyday life.

And

contrary to those, almost nobody is using Bitcoin for anything these days.

And so, nowadays, what crypto is, is there's thousands of different coins, and each of them represents something slightly different.

So, some of them are still trying to be like money, others are more like shares of companies, they're like digital stock,

and then other ones are like these meme coins that have been in the news lately are essentially tokens for gambling on that don't really serve any purpose other than that at all.

So if I'm going to say it back to you, cryptocurrency seems to me to be an amalgamation of monopoly money, poker tokens, and slips that you can get at the racetrack.

I don't want to oversimplify, but...

That's about right.

I mean, I would say the most legitimate ones are basically like stock in the shady offshore casino.

The cryptocurrency market exists, and we have these traditional financial systems that do have different currency with different valuations, but one has been around for centuries and the other has been around for a decade plus.

How intertwined have they become?

So right now, they're still pretty separate.

Crypto gambling has become like a pretty decent size industry.

And everyone on Wall Street can see, hey, there's a lot of people out there, not everybody, but a decent number of people out there who want to trade crypto to bet on the prices of these different coins.

And some of the more traditional players have said, why don't we make some money on that?

So they've come up with products that they can offer to you and I to try to steal some of that crypto gambling market from the crypto exchanges like Coinbase.

So that's like.

Right now, you can buy shares of a BlackRock Bitcoin ETF.

So that's like traditional Wall Street offering you a way to invest in crypto.

But in terms of like big banks, major players making huge bets on crypto themselves, that really hasn't happened so much yet.

And Annie actually wrote about in a recent piece that I thought was really good: that one of the risk right now isn't so much that if crypto blows up, it'll take down the traditional financial system.

It's more that

we've almost created this alternative unregulated financial system, and sketchy players of all types going forward can choose that and say, hey, I'm going to opt out of the regulated stock market.

I'm going to do something with crypto.

So

that could lead to more connections between traditional Wall Street and the crypto market.

But right now, they're still pretty isolated.

So, Andy, I want to bring you in on that.

So, is crypto something that can transform our financial system?

It may not do it now, but can it transform our system and turn into something of great import?

Or is it just a temporarily pervasive way to make money and to scam folks?

Yeah, it's a, it's, as Zeke pointed out, crypto is at this point, a lot of things.

So a lot of these are not really useful as currencies, as mediums of exchange, because they're also speculative assets.

So they tend to have an enormous amount of price volatility.

And we've even seen that in Bitcoin, which is, you know, the big and old and established one.

It's a speculative asset, much more so than it is a currency.

And then you also have all sorts of financial innovation or supposed financial innovation in terms of the way that financial actors might move money around and digital contracts and that kind of thing.

So yeah, right now, I don't think that crypto, even if it's a very large asset class, has much effect on the American financial system.

And even now, most Americans don't hold crypto as investments.

But I do think that we are entering an era where there is going to be a tremendous amount of risk.

And I kind of put it in three buckets.

So, one is that if you have a White House that is promoting and passing pro-crypto legislation, is even creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

More people might see it as being the same kind of thing as investing in the SP 500.

The second is that you could start to see much more interconnection between the traditional financial system

and the crypto financial system.

So crypto assets, crypto businesses could end up destabilizing financial firms that were heavily invested in them.

And then the third, which Zeke was referring to, is the tendency of Wall Street institutions to take new regulations and figure out how to use them to their own advantage.

And I think that Wall Street is going to be enormously in creative, creative in doing things like that.

They have a lot of money on the line and a lot of lawyers prepared to figure out how to use these new roles to their advantage.

And that, I think, is the biggest financial risk.

So if you remember WeWork, it was like this hot startup and people were, you know, really excited about it.

It filed to go public.

They wanted to raise money from regular investors so they could grow even bigger.

And when you file to go public on the stock market, you have to file this big prospectus that explains your whole business, all your financial results.

And it turned out that WeWork's financial results were totally weird.

There were things in there like the company had paid millions of dollars to license the word we from Adam Newman, who was also the CEO.

And the fallout of that was that

Newman was forced out and the company had to reorganize and to seek investment a different way.

So basically, like the market rejected this WeWorks filing.

And nowadays, WeWork potentially could just say, hey, we're going to sell WeToken and there's no rules about this.

We don't need to file all these disclosures, but don't you like WeWork?

It's so hot.

Look, we got free coffee.

All the cool startups are in our office.

And so, those are the kinds of rules that you could get around if there was like this alternative way for companies to raise money with crypto.

Before we get there, I want to take a few moments to do some primers.

So,

Zeke, explain what blockchain is.

So, I like to picture a big

Google sheet in the sky, and it's got two columns.

And in column A, it's got people's names.

And so it would be like Zeke, Stacy, and Annie.

And in column B, it's got a number.

And so let's say, you know, one for me,

three for Stacy, and six for Annie.

And that's how many Bitcoins you got.

And like that's the blockchain.

It's this spreadsheet.

And the Bitcoins don't really exist in any like other sense of the word.

They're just sort of numbers in this spreadsheet.

And if we were talking about Ethereum, then the numbers would represent Ethereum or Solana.

Those are Solana.

And the reason people think this is cool is that the big innovation of crypto is that you can maintain this Google sheet collectively.

Like the users of the cryptocurrency keep track of who's got what without any one powerful central counterparty.

Like a bank kind of works like a Google sheet like this, too, where like a bank is keeping track of how much money each person has and who's sending money to who.

But the way that banks work, you need to trust the bank and count on the bank to keep track of everybody's money.

And with crypto, it's like the computers that run this network cooperate to keep track.

That's excellent.

And so, Andy, I'm going to put it on you.

What are NFTs?

So, non-fungible tokens.

um

these are just like little digital assets they're often kind of silly they are often images or gifts or something and they have a unique identifier um and that's that's it i don't know if you have thoughts about that zeke i think if you had somebody who was invested in that economy they would describe it somewhat differently than i did but

no that's about right like what what makes an nft crypto is just that there are are these cartoons and you keep track of who owns the cartoons in one of these on one of these blockchains.

In a spreadsheet.

In a spreadsheet.

Okay.

So I'm going to give us a concrete example.

So during the campaign,

then candidate now President Trump sold the Trump watch, which could only be purchased using Bitcoin.

And we know that Trump and Melania each have their own meme coins.

So what you're telling me is that the only thing that is actually tangible in this whole sentence or paragraph that I just said is the watch.

Yes.

And have we seen those watches?

I mean, do we know that you really get the watch?

Look, look,

you're undercutting my argument here.

At least the watch, we've seen watches.

Okay.

So

I want to shift into the political because I think that's the important part of today's conversation.

But first, I want to say thank you because that is the most cogent explanation of crypto, blockchain nfts that i've been able to find so thank you both

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Andy, I wanted you to talk for a second about how cryptocurrency first started making its way into the political world.

Like, how do we chart its path from what we're basically the fringes to Silicon Valley and now to DC,

where we know that crypto's biggest super PATs poured $131 million into congressional races last cycle?

Absolutely.

This has been a really remarkable transition because one of the initial ethoses of crypto and crypto folks was this idea that with these decentralized managed Google sheets that Zeke is talking about, that you would be able to

fly above the traditional banking infrastructure and away from governments, that you would have a transnational

financial system with less regulation, with more trust, without the influence of government government away from the traditional financial system.

And so you might say, okay, well, why do you want a fancy spreadsheet that's managed in a decentralized fashion as opposed to one that is regulated by the American government and foreign governments, foreign partners, that is backed by federal insurance in some cases and federal protections, where you have the protection of American courts, of American prosecutors and investigators.

And the idea was that kind of sort of radical

new world one.

And in the intervening years, we've seen a remarkable, remarkable movement closer and closer to governments.

Governments have gotten excited about bringing crypto investment home into

their economies, creating a stable base for this supposed financial technology of the future, investing in crypto, even.

And I I think that you've seen the crypto industry recognize that it actually needs government regulation and political support in order to keep growing.

That your average American doesn't want to invest in a fringe financial asset with no security from the government, right?

It's really nice having like an FDIC insured bank account.

And we've seen a lot of crypto firms kind of imply that they have FDIC insurance when they don't.

And so the money and the political power is all actually really centralized in Washington and New York.

And I think that's why you've seen the entire industry basically, you know, start to lobby.

And now it finds itself with a very friendly Congress and an extraordinary, extraordinarily friendly.

And I also want to emphasize this deeply conflicted,

financially conflicted administration.

So Zeke, you recently wrote a Bloomberg article and you reported that Trump called Bitcoin a scam as recently as 2021.

And then he dove headfirst into these crypto ventures, which Annie's referring to.

In addition, he has the parent company of a social media platform announced plans to invest $250 million into new financial products, including buying Bitcoin.

So, can you explain a bit about this evolution in Trump from crypto skeptic to enthusiast, but also talk about Annie's concern about the interwoven, deeply concerning conflicts that have emerged?

Yes, so Trump's first administration was not that friendly to crypto.

They initiated some lawsuits against crypto companies that got the industry so upset.

But during this new campaign,

he first signaled that he might be open to some crypto stuff because he sold NFTs.

These were like digital images of Trump looking really jacked or hunting or he's an astronaut and they lived on on the blockchain they cost $99

and so the crypto guys they started thinking hey maybe this Trump guy could be on our side and

about a couple dozen of the top Bitcoin investors got together and maxed out to Trump and this is what it was sort of an effort organized by David Bailey the chief executive officer of Bitcoin magazine.

And this is what he said about it.

The campaign, they're used to bullshit artists all the time trying to sell them shit.

If you want it to progress, you got to show them the money.

And these guys gave Trump about $25 million collectively.

And he flew down to their conference in Nashville last July.

And I was in the audience there.

I was shocked because I thought...

Maybe I don't know, I understand much about politics, but I didn't think, I thought maybe you'd get a video message for Trump, like he waves, thanks for the 25 million.

No, like he came in person and he delivered almost all of their talking points and said he announced this plan to have the Bitcoin strategic reserve.

He said, if Bitcoin's going to go to the moon, I want to lead the way.

And he said that he would fire Gary Gensler, the chairman of the SEC, who's really hated by the industry because he's tried to

regulate it.

And Bailey himself had said that he was pretty surprised by how effective this was.

I mean, I would point out that this is the same person who did Trump steaks, Trump wine, Trump University, Trump casinos.

He is

very susceptible to fly-by-night ideas that he thinks he can brand.

And I think it's been deeply problematic,

given that almost every venture I just mentioned has failed.

Well,

this kind of annoyed the Bitcoin people because they really loved the speech and they loved the idea that the US government would spend tons of money to buy Bitcoin, which would push the price up and make them richer.

But within a few weeks after the speech, Trump announced that he was going to do his own crypto venture.

That's World Liberty Financial?

Yes, this was World Liberty Financial.

And

the Bitcoin people, I think

it was a little rich of them to complain that they wanted him to promote, Trump to promote their coins and not his own coin.

I think that Trump

basically,

he quickly realized something that is true about crypto, which is that the best way to make money in crypto is to sell your own made-up coin because it costs nothing to create and you get real money for it.

Buying someone else's coin is kind of for suckers.

This World Liberty...

It's a huge conflict of interest because the way this cryptocurrency is set up, it's unclear what it does, but he's offering to sell these World Liberty tokens.

And if you buy them,

75% of the money goes straight into Trump's, the Trump organization's pocket as a licensing fee.

So basically, anyone who might want to give Trump money can buy these tokens and then announce that they have and tell Trump, hey, just bought a bunch of your tokens.

You know,

here are my ideas for the crypto industry.

And pretty soon after this started,

some players in crypto did just that.

I mean, one of the players in crypto would be Justin Sun.

And for context, Justin Sun's purchase into an entity where Trump directly benefits financially has raised concerns because of the potential conflicts of interest and ethics because his company has an alleged use of militant groups and pending charges against him by U.S.

security regulators.

So, Andy, how should we think about Trump's involvement with Sun, given his various entanglements?

I think that people, including people who support the crypto industry,

who want crypto to thrive, who want Congress to pass crypto-friendly regulations, who want to get the SEC off of the crypto industry's back, should be furious about this.

This is a absolutely wild, wild opportunity for graft that we know has already led to foreign nationals essentially buying off the president and his family.

This is just a remarkably corrupt infrastructure.

And President Trump and his family and the people that he's brought into government as external advisors or even within government have shown a remarkable carelessness about maintaining

a lack of

real conflicts of interest of not opening themselves to this kind of industry purchasing, again, including from people who are under investigation or even charged by American regulators or the legal system to foreign actors.

And also, they're not making any effort to eliminate the appearance of conflicts here either.

I don't think that he cares.

He clearly doesn't care.

And so,

you know,

I really, really worry about this, especially given that we're going to go into this enormously fertile period of legal and regulatory change.

Well, speaking of which, part of what Trump did was to name David Sachs as the first ever, and I'm using air quotes for people who can't see me, crypto czar.

So, Andy, who is he and how will he shape the administration's crypto agenda?

Yeah, so he is one of many folks within the Trump orbit, again, both within government formally and outside of government, who

are

both pro-crypto folks and in some cases are actually invested personally in crypto.

So, Scott Besent, the Treasury Secretary, is pro-Bitcoin.

He's a hedge fund manager.

And Howard Luttnick, who's at Commerce,

he ran a financial firm called Cantor Fitzgerald, which is very, very heavily and has deep ties to Tether, which is a crypto firm.

And Mark Andreessen, who is a kind of Silicon Valley luminary

and a huge crypto booster, has proven, even though he's not in government, enormously influential in placing lower-level employees into a broad variety of agencies

and including the kind of Doge type efforts.

And so I really see this, you know, he's one guy.

And, you know, the AI and crypto czar, that's not a job with a lot of power.

I would be looking more to, you know, who Trump is putting at Treasury, who he's putting at CFTC, SEC, and these other agencies

with a lot of authority, as well as what he's going to do with the Fed, which is another very big question looming here.

So last week on Assembly Required, we talked a little bit about state capture.

And that's the phenomenon when when private interest basically take over government.

And what you two have just described is a Congress that was essentially purchased for about $131 million in crypto investment.

At least some members are beholden to the crypto currency guys for their seats.

You have a president who has his own crypto scheme that is wide ranging and rife with conflicts.

And you have administrators from the Treasury Department, which controls all payments and all of the money that we give the IRS, all of the money that comes from Social Security, all of the money that's currently being held captive by Dodge.

You've got

what's happening over, as you pointed, at Commerce, which is...

It's in the name.

It's how we make money in this country and think about how money gets made.

And you've got SACS.

We've got two-thirds of our three-legged stool that is now under the auspices of this cryptocurrency administration.

Let's talk a little bit about the press conference from last week.

Sachs tried to talk about crypto and what it means to have in Congress a joint working group that's going to be formed between the House and the Senate to advance crypto legislation.

Given all that I just said,

Zeke, then Annie, why should we be terrified?

So

the Trump administration has said they're going to totally rework crypto regulation, but they're still opposed to fraud.

They said we're still going to fight crypto fraud.

However, there's a big problem with

the way their plans are shaping up.

One of the areas right now that people are most concerned about in crypto, like the crypto people themselves think is very scammy is meme coins these are the like the trump token kanye west is talking about doing one right now um that's truly horrible um

but these are just it's believed to be kind of a rigged market where people lose a lot of money so you might say hey this should be regulated you know the sec usually is the regulator that handles these types of things.

They should make up some rules for this.

Well, the SEC has come out and said, you you know, after all this crypto lobbying, we don't think that cryptocurrencies are securities.

We're the securities and exchange commission.

This isn't basically, this is none of our business.

So it's going to be very hard for them to police fraud if they don't have the authority to oversee the market at all.

Plus, the president is doing a meme coin right now.

Is the SEC going to make rules that would affect the president's meme coin negatively?

Probably not.

So it's just hard to imagine that they're going to come up with effective rules to really rein in crypto fraud, which even people in the industry would agree is rampant.

Yeah, and I would note that the Trump administration has gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which again, whatever you think about it politically, it existed to collect consumer complaints.

about rip-offs and frauds.

You know, if you got ripped off by somebody who was regulated by the SEC, it's not that the SEC didn't have public-facing options, but the CFPB was really, really oriented towards people who didn't quite understand why they were getting scammed.

It was a very friendly organization and it proved actually pretty effective at tamping down on things.

They would go after companies, they would help people recover money.

It's been completely gutted.

We haven't had crypto-specific legislation in the United States.

And so the crypto industry has indicated that this has created regulatory uncertainty.

It's prevented investment from investment banks and Main Street banks into crypto.

It has failed to give consumers confidence about these products.

And in some cases, there have been kind of

confusing rules and jurisdictional issues about what should be regulated, where, and where it should be regulated.

And so the crypto industry had kind of complained that what had happened happened was that the government had been doing regulation by enforcement, which basically means that the SEC was sort of creating rules by going after individual bad actors.

And so, you know, I'm not even actually sure that there's a good argument for broad crypto legislation, because I think that the regulatory regime that we had in some ways was working okay, even if the crypto industry didn't love it.

And the worst of all worlds would be to create crypto-friendly regulations that in fact loosen the entire architecture of financial regulation, including for non-crypto products.

I do think there are some good things that could come out of it.

It looks like we're going to get stable coin regulation, which would be really great.

These are coins that are meant to be tethered to the dollar.

We've had some spectacular cases.

So it makes them useful as a medium of exchange, and they've become a really important part of the financial infrastructure.

But yeah, I don't, I'm trying to think of other positive things that could come out of this.

And I'm sure that there are some, but I would say that that's the main one.

But yeah, I'm really, really worried.

So I want to focus on one thing you said.

Can you remind folks what precipitated the creation of the CFPB?

Yeah, so the CFPB was created by Dodd-Frank, right?

And it was created in the wake of the last.

major crisis.

There was a feeling that, so there's a kind of interesting tendency for fraud to increase before big financial crashes, which is in part understood to be because firms kind of start skirting the rules in order to make more money.

And also because fraud itself can be kind of, you know, if you're scamming people, that can be a sign that there's just froth in the market and people aren't paying attention.

But there was this feeling after Dodd-Frank that there needed to be a consumer-focused agency that could help people

if they were being

scammed or even if they were just being, you know, charged extortionate interest rates that kind of thing and so this independent watchdog was created as an additional agency um along with the cfdc the sec treasury fed all of the other financial regulators of which there are many

so the reason i wanted to focus on that is that you know one concern that both you zeke and you annie have noticed is that there is a concern that a crypto bubble is forming and that this increased interest from the administration is actually precipitating the very crisis that we are anticipating.

So, can you, both of you, discuss, and I'll start with you, Zeke, what are the implications to the economy right now of what's happening with crypto and using Andy's phrase, the froth that's being created in the market?

If this or when this current crypto bubble pops, you know, a lot of people will lose money.

And, you know, that

you know, it's terrible.

I don't think it's going to lead to some sort of cascading effect into

the normal financial system or that it would have like huge impact on the American economy.

There was something that Paul Atkins, who's Trump's pick to be the new head of the SEC, said that's really stuck with me about

the Trump administration's approach.

He was on a podcast and he was talking about

their regulatory philosophy and he said speaking about investors they may lose all the money by investing in something but that's their right

and it's like this move away from this idea that we should protect investors that we should look out for them it's more like everyone everyone for themselves and do your own research, as the crypto people say.

And I think that's really pernicious because who's got time for that?

I don't want to to read every like credit card contract that I sign.

You know, I can't, it would be a huge drag on the economy if we all had to read, you know, every piece of fine print we ever got.

We sort of rely on companies to not be scamming us all the time.

So, Annie, is there an example out there of a country that's approaching crypto regulation the right way, that's protecting its people the right way?

So, I would note that this has been an issue for a lot of countries, including the United states a lot of crypto firms are not based in jurisdictions with strong financial regulations um of course one of the elements of the crypto market is that you do have um state investment into crypto um for dangerous purposes so we actually just last week saw North Korean hackers steal, supposedly North Korean hackers steal $1.5 billion

off of a crypto exchange, which caused another wave of redemptions, destabilizing the business.

We have evidence of countries like Iran using crypto to

evade things like sanctions or, you know, some other countries.

It's actually been a little bit hard to subject some of these firms to stronger regulations where they have existed.

And so, you know, the world's largest crypto exchange right now, Binance, it refuses to even say which jurisdiction it's based in.

And so that's just one problem that we've had.

But yes, other countries, I think, have had stronger crypto

legislative regimes.

And I think that we've seen this kind of push and pull between countries wanting to protect consumers, wanting to protect their existing financial infrastructures, and also wanting to get in on the big cash grab,

wanting to support whatever financial innovation might come out of this.

And I think the United States is now sort of the strongest example of that.

The SEC just asked the federal court to pause its case against Binance, which, as you pointed out, is the world's largest crypto exchange.

And that happened because leadership, our federal government is rethinking its past enforcement actions.

Can one of you break down just a little bit more the Binance lawsuit and what this pause could mean?

And one piece that I'm thinking about is

when you talk about what happened in North Korea, when we think about the foreign actors who are involved, but when you also sit it side by side with the anarchy happening right now in our own financial systems under the Dodge Committee, is there a possibility that Trump could move any taxpayer dollars into crypto?

And sort of how does that intersect with the issue with Binance?

On Binance, this was,

it's amazing to see this case paused.

It seemed like a real

layup of a case.

Basically, the SEC has sued almost all of the biggest crypto exchanges in the U.S.

And their SEC's argument is that some of the things you're offering are

securities.

You should have been following our rules.

Therefore, you're an unlicensed securities exchange.

And the case against Binance was helped by some internal communications that the federal authorities obtained.

There's one where one guy at Binance is texting another guy and he said, bro, we are operating an unlicensed securities exchange.

There's an additional word in there, Z, as you can recall.

I think we can fill in the dots.

Yeah, but even the cases without these text messages honestly seem pretty obvious.

Even if you offer one illegal security, you violated the SEC's rules.

And so the SEC now, under Trump, has not just put the Binance case on hold, but they've signaled to the other big crypto players they're going to stop those cases.

They're basically saying,

hands off, like this isn't, we're not going to regulate crypto exchanges.

So it's just kind of crazy to see that they would

abandon

this altogether.

On the Trump administration investing in crypto, that's this Bitcoin strategic reserve, which Trump mentioned in his speech and has said that he's going to do a couple of times since then.

One Republican senator has talked about investing $100 billion

into

Bitcoin.

Annie, do you think this has any chance of

happening?

I kind of think so.

I don't know.

So you got a Republican House, got a Republican Senate.

They are not

particularly focused on it, it seems to me, right?

Like they're really focusing on tax legislation and sort of broader spending legislation.

And I think that there's probably going to be other legislative priorities, although I do think that they will push crypto stuff this year.

You know, so if you look at the bills that were proposed for this, the idea was like to buy crypto and then at some point use it to retire the national debt.

This is not like a great way to go about that.

There's a lot of ways to retire the national debt.

You do not need to be invested in a highly speculative cryptocurrency in order to do it.

So yeah, I don't know.

Crazier things have happened.

I bet they'll do it.

What's $100 billion?

You know, go for it, sure.

What's $100 billion?

Right.

For the government, it's not enough to achieve its goal.

Like if we wanted to retire the national debt by taking our money to the casino, we would need to bet like $17 trillion and hope that we double it.

But $100 billion is enough to make the price of Bitcoin go up.

And even just talking about this has been great for the price of Bitcoin.

And like I was saying at the beginning, people aren't really using Bitcoin for stuff, but people are betting lots of money on the price going up.

So for the Bitcoiners, it's really important to bring in new pools of money that can buy Bitcoin.

And like, this is the biggest pool of money around.

So it means a lot to them if the U.S.

government does it.

Yeah, it's so worth noting and just stepping back to say that the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is only tied to demand for those currencies.

And early holders benefit enormously from having new holders come in.

That's the way that they make money.

Right.

So, and again, maybe this is simplistic, but most financial assets, their worth is derived from an income stream, from a mortgage, from corporate profits.

And so, you know, something like Bitcoin, it's much more like owning an artwork or something that's not going to generate any income, but the value is just only determined by the amount of money put in, which is, as Zeke points out, exactly why people want governments to get in on it.

And it's also why price stability, which is a really important component of cryptocurrencies, would be bad for Bitcoin holders.

They want the price to go up, right?

Which is why it is deeply problematic and highly concerning that the President of the United States stands to benefit financially to an order of magnitude if the Congress passes a law that allows the investment, or in fact compels the investment of $100 billion

into

essentially an ephemeral value that will generate more money for him.

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In addition to the excellent reporting from both of you on the subject, and I can't thank you enough for just how thoughtful you've both been about this.

And I encourage folks to go and look up all of your writings on this.

What are other resources that you recommend that our listeners go to to stay up to date and informed?

Because like so much, things are moving fast.

And I'm going to go with you, Annie, first.

It's so hard because sorry, not to like push the question.

I'm often, I'm like, if you have any option to just put put your head in the sand and go outside and touch grass and try not to absorb what's going on, I think it might be better for your long-term mental health to do that.

But one nice thing, I guess, about watching crypto legislation go through the House and the Senate is that it is going to take some time and there is going to be a lot of lobbying.

And so

that process, I think, is not going to be lightning fast in the way that we've seen some other executive actions be.

The crypto world is kind of impenetrable by design.

And

it's so full of jargon that is frankly not worth your time to try to understand.

And I would say like,

I spent years going all around the world trying to answer this question.

Like, it can't really be this dumb, as dumb as it seems, is it?

And

what I would say after

investigating a giant crypto bubble in the Philippines and crypto-fueled human trafficking in Cambodia, I realized that not only is it even dumber than I ever imagined, but it actually has a lot of bad

effects on the real world.

But I would say, like the crypto guys always say, do your own research.

And I would say it's honestly kind of a dangerous thing.

You know, that some of these ideas are really superficially appealing.

And

I would say before you get involved with this, you know, really

watch out and look at what's happened to,

you know, the last like three crypto bubbles.

So I'm going to summarize both of you with this.

Crypto is dumb, but dumb is dangerous.

And what we need to do is keep paying attention to the people in charge and letting them know that we don't want them to do dangerous, dumb things to our country.

Does that make sense?

Perfect.

I like it.

Zeke Fox,

Annie, thank you both so very much for being on this episode of Assembly Required.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks a lot, Stacey.

Absolutely.

As always on Assembly Required, we like to give our audience actionable tools for facing the challenges of today.

So here's this week's toolkit in which we encourage you as always to be curious, solve problems, and do good.

So first, if you want to learn more about cryptocurrency and its newly entwined relationship with our government, check out both Annie and Zeke's work at Bloomberg and the Atlantic.

Number two, if you're considering or know someone else who is thinking of investing in cryptocurrency or other high-risk assets, please encourage them to prioritize safety.

Invest in what you understand, as Zeke pointed out, and avoid following trends blindly.

Always research companies, funds, or assets before committing your money, and encourage other people in your life to do the same, especially those who may be the most vulnerable to financial losses.

It's not worth the danger.

And three, start asking questions of your elected officials.

Since we're showing up in their inboxes and at their town halls, let's put them to the test.

Ask about their positions on crypto and pay attention to how they respond.

Yes, we have a number of urgent issues, but we can't afford to let this one escape our attention or theirs.

Remember, you can find the toolkit recommendations online for each topic because we know it's hard to remember everything, especially if you're listening on the go.

So on the podcast website, click view episode for all the details.

And if you're watching the show on YouTube at youtube.com slash at assembly required podcast, just expand the episode description and you will find recommendations to learn more and do more.

I am delighted to welcome Farah back to the show.

Hi, Stacey.

Excited to be back on.

So before we dive into this week's listener question, I want to talk a little bit about cultural diversity.

So we're nearing the end of Black History Month and as a Black woman, I do my best to celebrate it to my fullest extent.

every single year, which looks at anything like me going to a museum or an art installation that has has an emphasis on like Black culture, or honestly, just having like a picnic with my friends in the park.

But I feel this year, the celebration of Blackness, Black history, and Black culture was extra important to me.

We're coming off the heels of a Black woman losing the presidential election to a man who has been publicly racist and sexist, who has also spent months of his presidency rolling back civil rights and DEI policies and programs, which you discussed in an incredible episode with Kenji Yoshino, which everyone should go listen to to right after this.

So, my question is a two-parter.

How do we continue to celebrate the diversity and difference of people in the world, especially in the United States, when people of color are actively being pitted against each other in this administration?

And my second question, which is a little more lighthearted, is what are your favorite black-owned businesses that people can support all year round?

Farah, thank you for the question.

And I know it's particularly salient as we end

Black History Month, which has been decommissioned basically by this administration, or at least actively ignored, unless it's to his benefit.

But the role of a president should not overshadow the role of the people.

And your question is exactly right.

We can celebrate diversity and difference by actually talking about it.

They can only pit us against each other if we agree to fight each other.

And we don't have to.

We can celebrate one another.

We can lift up each other's cultures.

We can lift up our differences and be intentional about saying why we're doing it.

When I was in the state legislature, I was there at a time, there was only one Latino who was a Democrat.

And he often had to go to the well to speak about every issue that engaged the conversation of the Hispanic population.

And I didn't think that was right.

And so I made it my business to always speak up when he was going to have to speak up.

That was a small thing to do, but it was critically important to me because he needed to know that even if he was just one, he was not alone.

This is a moment where we have the responsibility of community because the best way to celebrate diversity and difference is to build community using those differences as the thing that binds us together.

That's what I try to do every day.

That's what this podcast is about.

That's what my work is about.

And what we cannot do is let an administration that only has four years take away what we've managed to build in this country over the last 250.

Now, your second question about my favorite black-owned businesses, I will tell you, I am a fan of Actively Black.

It's a small business that creates incredibly comfortable athleisure wear.

In fact, I'm wearing their pants.

And it gives back to their community in meaningful ways.

And if you live here in Georgia, I want you to try out the boutique Squash Blossom, which is Indicator.

They make amazing stuff.

It's really fun to visit also if you'd like a directory of many black owned businesses visit the directory at buyblack.us that is by

b l a c k dot us

so thank you thank you thank you for asking the question yeah of course well actually i'm really excited about the athleisure um brand because i'm in my hot yoga era so this is gonna be really fun for me and i will buy all of their clothing there you go Okay, thank you for your thoughtful answer.

This week's listener question comes from Chloe who emailed us last week.

So Chloe is a green card resident, and she wrote in that she hears so many people like yourself say to contact your congressman to advocate for issues that matter to you.

But she says that she's always been hesitant to do this because she's not sure if her voice or opinions would matter to a congressperson because she can't legally vote.

She's also cautious of the political environment and scared to put her family at risk.

So her question is, are there ways for non-citizens to engage politically while not not putting ourselves at risk?

Absolutely.

And Chloe, thank you first for the question and for wanting to do something even though it feels dangerous.

As a green card holder, you are here legally and you are impacted.

You may not be able to vote, but I'm absolutely certain we have you pay taxes.

Therefore, your voice matters.

It's taxation without representation that we oppose.

And so you have the absolute right to call your congressperson, to call your city council member, to call your school board, and make your opinion heard.

You don't have to give them your citizenship status to say something out loud.

But you should also be careful.

And I think that's an important point to emphasize in this moment.

Do not give information you don't need to give.

Do not share details about your address.

Sometimes we feel the best way to make people believe that we have the right to say something is to validate ourselves.

You are validated because you're here.

You're validated because you're speaking up on behalf of those who feel they have to be silent.

And so be careful about the information you share, except for your opinions, those you have the right to share.

Well, amazing.

Thank you so much for that.

Absolutely.

Well, Farrah, thank you once again for helping us dive into our listener questions.

And thank you for being one of our listener questions yourself.

Yeah, of course.

Well, see you next time.

Take care.

Now, a reminder, we can be found wherever you get your podcast, including on YouTube.

And if you want to tell us what you've learned or what you've solved, send us an email at assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

That wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Alona Minkowski, and our associate producer is Paulina Velasco.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilius Vitopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroat, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, and Samantha Slossberg for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long, Madeline Herringer, and me, Stacey Abrams.

Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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