Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Chris Giancarlo is a serious contender to become the first-ever U.S. "Crypto Czar," a new position President-elect Donald Trump is weighing to oversee the $3 trillion blockchain industry possibly.
The former public servant, who is known as “Crypto Dad” due to his work in advancing clear regulations during his two-year tenure — including paving the way for bitcoin futures to trade on U.S. exchanges — told The Block in an interview on Wednesday that he has already turned down positions running the CFTC and Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Trump has been very specific in laying out a series of initiatives to make the United States the crypto capital of the world,” Giancarlo said, referring to a July speech the once and future president made at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville.
This includes “creating a strategic reserve of bitcoin to creating a Crypto Council to guaranteeing people's ability to have self-hosted wallets,” Giancarlo said. “In other areas he's talked about a capital gains exemption for gains on U.S. domestic cryptos. He's talked about ending the debanking of crypto — sometimes called Choke Point 2.0 — and the a passage of new rules and regulations out of the CFTC and the SEC as well as stablecoin legislation.”
Giancarlo, a key member of the Trump transition team, added that crypto will be a “considerable priority” for the incoming administration. Although a former crypto skeptic, Trump cozied up to industry players over the past year while seeking reelection and has made a number of promises to improve the outlook for the crypto industry in the U.S.
“As candidates go, they're often not very specific. I think Trump was remarkably specific about what he would do,” Giancarlo said, noting that the real estate magnate has surrounded himself with pro-crypto advocates like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
“The amount of attention and campaign contributions the crypto industry contributed this cycle is quite remarkable, and probably dispositive in a number of races,” Giancarlo said. “The fact that contributors like Fairshake [the pro-crypto SuperPAC backed by entities like Coinbase] have dry powder left over could contribute to the next cycle and will result in responsive policy.”
Indeed, a cohort of industry leaders strongly favored Trump’s reelection. In one instance, at least 18 donors gave more than $5.5 million in various tokens to the Trump 47 joint fundraising committee mere days before Election Day.
To some extent, Trump is already making good on his word to support crypto — perhaps partly because of his familial connections to blockchain projects like the decentralized lending protocol World Liberty Financial. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has reportedly met with the incoming president to help shape his crypto platform.
Giancarlo said there’s an “existing gap right now” in crypto regulation, particularly in the spot market trading of the two largest cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and ether. He noted that he supported efforts by Senator Debbie Stabenow, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, to give the CFTC authority over digital commodities markets.
“The CFTC has overseen more new product launches than almost any regulator in the world and certainly more than the SEC,” Giancarlo said. “The CFTC is a very capable and competent regulator and can handle that spot authority.”
He added that the current SEC administration had dropped the ball on regulating crypto and that Chairman Gary Gensler should have “followed our example” of the CFTC actively engaging with the industry when Giancarlo was in charge. Giancarlo took over Gensler in leading the CFTC in 2018 and said he had to “clean up” his predecessor’s mess.
“Gensler's unwillingness to engage with crypto has actually kept it at a less mature phase of its development,” Giancarlo said. “Ending the suppression is going to bring it to a more mature and more useful period of development.”
He rebutted Gensler’s claims that current securities rules should apply to crypto projects and companies. Giancarlo said there was a missed opportunity to create “procedures and policies tailored to crypto.”
“I've heard over and over again: 'same activity, same rules,’” said Giancarlo. “But that's actually not the way the SEC operates. There are different rules for municipal securities than there are for corporate debt. There are different rules for debt securities than there are for equity securities. There are different rules for private placements than there are for public offerings. The SEC has a long tradition of having tailored regulations.”
Apart from that, Gensler has also dramatically reduced the agency’s standing among the American public and federal court system through its “overreach on enforcement actions and litigation.” This includes when it was sanctioned for lying during a case it brought against a Utah-based crypto firm.
“That did tremendous damage to the morale of the agency of earnest and hardworking federal employees who are embarrassed to be associated with an agency that would cut corners in order just to win cases,” Giancarlo said. “I'll let Gary defend his record, and the judgment of history will determine its value.”
While Giancarlo, who has taken the moral stance of not holding digital assets while publicly advocating for the blockchain industry, is likely in agreement with many of Trump’s crypto policies, there is one possible point of contention: central bank digital currencies.
Trump, like many GOP politicians, has been outspoken against imposing a CBDC in the U.S., which critics see as a possible tool for surveillance and financial coercion. Giancarlo and his former CFTC colleague Daniel Gorfine have created the Digital Dollar Project to study putting the greenback on the blockchain.
“If you study my work in this area and the work of the Digital Dollar Project, we've actually never called for development or deployment of a U.S. central bank digital currency,” Giancarlo said. “Our view is that in the future, whether the U.S. adopts a digital dollar or not, Americans are going to be dealing with CBDCs out of China, Europe, and elsewhere as well as decentralized systems of value like Bitcoin and Ethereum and highly centralized, commercially operated systems of value like stablecoins.”
While Giancarlo advocates for private-sector solutions to “digitize the dollar,” he is mindful that stablecoins can threaten financial privacy.
“Any centralized system, whether it's run by a government or a commercial actor, becomes a honeypot of data of people's financial transactions and a target for control and censorship,” Giancarlo, a board member for stablecoin issuer Paxos, said.
“The real questions the United States needs to ask are how do we future-proof the dollar and preserve its reserve currency status?” he said. “Most importantly, how do we preserve the values for which the dollar stands: values of free enterprise, free market capitalism and economic expression?"
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