After the crash of FTX, many US crypto projects have become disillusioned with the Democratic Party and have turned their energies and resources to lobbying their interests in Donald Trump's entourage. The market seems to be entering a new era where many are willing to abandon previous ideals in favor of cooperating with the government within the traditional economy.
We looked into the tangled ties between major crypto projects and officials of the new presidential administration and what their leaders are trying to accomplish.
Exits from PayPal
One of the most influential crypto-lobbyists in the US is PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel - a venture capitalist by trade and a technocrat by spirit.
His company Founders Fund began aggressively buying up bitcoin in 2014 and liquidated all of its positions in digital gold before the market crash in 2022, generating ~$1.8 billion in profits. According to Reuters, the fund returned to the crypto in the second half of 2023, investing $200 million in it before BTC-ETF approval.
Through Thiel's patronage, his old acquaintance and partner at businessman-owned fund Mithril Capital, J.D. Vance, ended up as vice president of the United States. When Vance decided to run for the Senate in 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to his campaign.
The U.S. vice president also raised $93 million to start his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital. Not only Thiel, but also Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) fund co-founder Marc Andriessen helped him with this.
a16z was a major funder of Fairshake, a crypto-centric political committee that gave about $140 million to support candidates running for Congress in 2024. So the appointment of policy director at a16z crypto Brian Quintenz as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) doesn't come as a big surprise.
All of the above are closely linked to Elon Musk. In 2022, a16z, along with Binance and Sequoia became one of the largest investors in the deal to buy Twitter. In 2024, these same companies, in addition to Binance, began "helping" Trump pick new candidates for key administration posts. The New York Times provides the following list of people close to Thiel and Musk who influence the White House:
- Marc Andreessen - founder of a16z;
- Jared Birchall - head of Musk's family office, advisor to Dogecoin Foundation;
- Sean Maguire - partner at Sequoia Capital;
- Trey Stevens - co-founder of Anduril; ;
- Shyam Sankar - CTO of Palantir; ;
- David Marcus - CEO of Lightspark, ex-head of Meta's blockchain division.
It is worth recalling that Musk himself became the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) specially created for him, and the position of "cryptocurrency czar" was given to David Sachs, who served as chief operating officer of PayPal.
This list would seem to be enough to assess the depth of crypto-related business penetration in the presidential administration, but there is one more notable player.
Tether market
Standing apart in this context, Tether is one of the top 20 buyers of U.S. government debt. Cantor Fitzgerald, headed by Howard Lutnick, the current Secretary of Commerce, acts as an operator for the purchase and storage of U.S. government bonds for the USDT issuer. According to the Wall Street Journal, the bank owns a 5% stake in Tether.
If we delve into the history of Tether, we can find billionaire Brock Pierce among its founders. He was also a director of the Bitcoin Foundation, founder of EOS, and one of his companies figured in the Mt.Gox case.
Pierce knows Trump through a single handshake. They are linked by Steve Bannon, a senior adviser to the president in his first term.
In 2001, Pierce founded Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), a pioneer in the industry of currency services for MMORPGs. In 2006, Bannon took over as CEO at IGE.
In 2018, he stated that in 2016, Pierce's employment with Trump's presidential campaign prevented them from focusing on working together in crypto.
In 2019, EOS acquired the domain owned by MicroStrategy (now Strategy) for $30 million to launch social networking startup Voice. Thiel, Chinese mining giant Bitmain and Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz were among the project's investors.
A year later, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor announced the first public purchase of bitcoin to the tune of $250 million. More than 40 percent of the company's shares, as of March 2021, were held by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard Group and Citadel. This suggests that even then the financiers had already endorsed Saylor's plan.
Probably, the camp consisting of Coinbase, Grayscale, Digital Currency Group (DCG, Grayscale's parent company) of Barry Silbert was "late" to the market of "mutually beneficial" cryptocurrencies. The latter was at the origin of Ripple, Coinbase, CoinDesk and other projects.
DCG's connections extended not only to Republicans, but also to representatives of the Democratic Party. For example, a key consultant on the company's board of directors, Lawrence Summers, served as U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton and headed the National Economic Council under Barack Obama;
The political environment changed after the crash of FTX in 2022. The Democratic Party lost influence in the market, and for many the personification of its role in cryptocurrencies was the figure of Gary Gensler - now the former head of the SEC, who was remembered for his personal ties to the Sam Bankman-Fried family.
Many have embraced the new rules of the market, which now shares the option of government regulation with a focus on domestic crypto businesses and dollar-backed stablecoins. Even neutral Coinbase has gotten into the game, giving Fairshake $25 million for the 2026 midterm elections, and Ripple donated $5 million to Trump's inauguration.
In parallel, Saylor openly calls for gold to be destroyed as an asset class. In his view, in this way the banked savings of "enemies of the United States" would be devalued and Washington would control "the world's network of reserve capital."
It seems that instead of developing the principles of decentralized systems, we got another financial institution managing capital flows and liquidity. And even in social networks you can see less and less often the spirit of the former cryptocurrency market against the state monopoly;
