Cryptocurrency is about to come out of the shadows. Odds currently favor former President Donald Trump reclaiming the Oval Office in 2025. His new running mate — Ohio Senator J.D. Vance — is the strongest signal yet that an overhaul of America’s flawed crypto regime is imminent.
The significance of a crypto-friendly White House cannot be overstated. For years, the world’s richest economy has relegated Web3 to the margins. Crypto’s exclusion from regulated financial markets has been central to virtually all of the industry’s shortcomings. That will soon change, and adoption will dramatically accelerate.
The results may disappoint those who envision Web3 as a parallel economy unbound by regulatory restraints. Instead, crypto’s new era will be marked by a full integration of blockchain technology into the fabric of the existing financial system. The U.S. will greatly benefit.
Vance — a former venture capitalist and Bitcoin (BTC) holder – is one of the Senate’s most outspoken advocates of Web3. He has loudly condemned the United States' “regulation by enforcement” regime, won the full-throated endorsement of industry lobbyists, and drafted some of the most crypto-friendly legislation on Capitol Hill.
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In 2023, Vance wrote a bill to shield banks from ongoing regulatory pressure to sever ties with crypto platforms. In February, he signed an open letter decrying the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) aggressive treatment of DEBTBox, a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocol, as “unconscionable.”
NEW VIDEO
Ohio Senator JD Vance on Gensler:
He is way way way too political in his regulation of securities.
He has it backwards when wanting to ban useful tokens and seemingly not caring about those without specific utility.
Sen. Vance sees blockchain as key to… pic.twitter.com/yKoNmk4Bm4
— Bill Hughes : wchughes.eth (@BillHughesDC) February 27, 2024
In June, Vance circulated draft Senate legislation that was reportedly even more crypto-friendly than the House’s industry-backed Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21). He also has first-hand experience with blockchain technology from his stint at Peter Thield’s Mithril Capital, which invested in crypto infrastructure platform Paxos’s $142 million Series C in 2020.
More fundamentally, Vance — along with other America-First acolytes such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley — is an icon of the young, tech-savvy wing of Trump’s party that has brought technology regulation to the forefront of national policy debates.
In tapping Vance as his vice presidential nominee, Trump has shown that his recent courtship of Web3 is more than just talk. Assuming Trump wins the presidential election in November — and betting markets put the odds above 70% that he will — the White House will soon adopt a robust and deeply-informed pro-crypto orientation.
An America-first crypto agenda
America is already the epicenter of blockchain development. Even now, amid ongoing hostility from regulators, the U.S. hosts a staggering portion of Web3’s leading protocols — including Avalanche, Chainlink, Filecoin, Solana, Uniswap and many more — and around a third of the world’s Ethereum validators and Bitcoin mining activity. The crucial missing link is a clear framework for interfacing with the real economy.
Historically, U.S. regulators subjected blockchain protocols to arbitrary and punitive enforcement actions while seemingly stymying innovation at every turn. The result has been a bifurcated system, marked by a freewheeling ecosystem of unregulated Web3 protocols — fraught with scams and mismanagement — and mind-numbingly slow and timid progress among regulated institutions.
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The solution is not a regulatory free-for-all but regulatory clarity. That is exactly what a Trump White House is likely to bring. Republican-led bills such as FIT21 paint a clear picture of what a better system might look like.
The SEC should embrace the issuance of tokenized securities — in full compliance with existing disclosure requirements — as a means of distributing value among tokenholders. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) should oversee cryptocurrency spot markets and blockchain networks, including decentralized exchanges.
Meanwhile, clear guidelines for safe and transparent dollar-backed stablecoins, such as Circle’s U.S. Dollar Coin (USDC) will spark a proliferation of on-chain dollarization, securing America’s lead role in the digital economy.
The idea of an economy built on decentralization and self-sovereignty once felt like a distant fantasy. No longer. In all likelihood, Trump will be America’s next President, with crypto-friendly Vance at his side. Times are changing, and those in Web3 who managed to hold on this long will reap the rewards.
Alex O’Donnell is a senior writer for Cointelegraph. He previously founded DeFi developer Umami Labs and worked for seven years as a financial journalist at Reuters, where he covered M&A and IPOs. He is also the crypto growth lead at startup accelerator Expert Dojo.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph
