The Banking & Payments Show: Crypto Under Trump, Bitcoin’s Path, and Where Digital Currencies Will Land

In today’s episode, we talk about what’s going on with Bitcoin since Trump won the election, how his policy moves could affect cryptocurrency, and the likelihood of America launching a digital dollar. Join the discussion with host and Head of Business Development, Rob Rubin, and Analysts Grace Broadbent and Tyler Van Dyke.

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Episode Transcript:

Rob Rubin (00:00):

Did you know 70% of CMOs are now responsible for steering their company's AI initiatives? Find out what it takes to be a successful CMO in this new AI-powered era of marketing. Download our playbook, Driving Growth in the AI Era, exclusively from Zeta Global. Hello everyone and welcome to the Banking and Payment Show, a behind-the-numbers podcast from eMarketer, made possible by Zeta Global. Today is February 11th, 2025. I'm Rob Rubin, Head of Business Development at eMarketer and your host today. Today we're going to chat about what's going to happen in the crypto market now that Trump is back in the White House. And joining me are eMarketer Analysts, Grace Broadbent, and Tyler Van Dyke. Hey, guys, how are you doing?

Tyler Van Dyke (00:51):

Hey Rob. Happy to be back.

Grace Broadbent (00:53):

Hi, I'm happy to be here today.

Rob Rubin (00:54):

Yeah, I'm happy to have you guys back. Tyler, you haven't been back especially in a while, so I'm so happy to have you. Especially because you guys haven't been back and I thought it would be fun because I'm not quite sure if you guys are young millennials or old Gen Zers, but you're in that sort of ballpark, and maybe I'm a few generations older, so I thought it would be fun if we took some of the expressions from my youth and see if you know what they mean.

Grace Broadbent (01:21):

Oh gosh. Let's do it.

Tyler Van Dyke (01:22):

All right.

Rob Rubin (01:23):

Or if you know where it came from.

Grace Broadbent (01:26):

Okay.

Rob Rubin (01:26):

Be kind, rewind. Where did it become famous? Be kind, rewind.

Tyler Van Dyke (01:31):

If I had to guess, it would be Blockbuster.

Rob Rubin (01:35):

Bam, got it.

Tyler Van Dyke (01:35):

The expectation that you rewind the VHS before you return it.

Rob Rubin (01:39):

That is right.

Grace Broadbent (01:39):

I would not have gotten that one.

Rob Rubin (01:43):

What's your bag?

Tyler Van Dyke (01:44):

What's your bag?

Grace Broadbent (01:48):

Gen Zers, we say, "Let's go get this bag." Is that similar?

Rob Rubin (01:48):

Nope, totally different.

Tyler Van Dyke (01:48):

What's your bag?

Rob Rubin (01:54):

What's your bag is like what's your problem, like why are you upset?

Tyler Van Dyke (01:59):

Oh, that's not one I've heard before.

Rob Rubin (02:01):

Why are you crashing? That's a Gen Z expression.

Grace Broadbent (02:03):

Yeah, I'm crashing out right now.

Rob Rubin (02:07):

Crashing out.

Grace Broadbent (02:08):

I'm crashing out during this conversation.

Rob Rubin (02:09):

Right. You're wigging out. That's an old expression. All right, well, that was fun. Before we jump into our discussion about what's next for crypto now that Trump is president again, I wanted to give everybody sort of a quick background of how we got here. So when Trump was president from 2017 to 2021, he made no sweeping crypto ban or any monumental regulation, but he generally had a skeptical tone on Twitter at the time, and any enforcement was really done at an agency level. Now, under the Biden administration, there were more formal efforts to coordinate federal oversight, and the SEC definitely took a stricter stance on crypto projects and exchanges.

(02:56):

Now during the recent campaign, Trump actually actively courted the crypto community and he made some promises in that. So after the election in November, in fact, he and the first lady launched their own meme coins, so now he sort of likes crypto. So with that background, let's get into the headlines. In the headlines, I choose an article about the topic and we discuss it. And today I chose an article from a few weeks ago in Reuters, Crypto Markets Steady after Trump's First Policy Move. The article covered what's going on with Bitcoin and Trump's first policy move. So let's start with Grace. Can you give us your take first on what's going on with Bitcoin since Trump won the election?

Grace Broadbent (03:45):

The biggest news is it passed the $100,000 milestone, a milestone the community has been waiting for years and years to finally happen. It happened very soon after the election. It was right after Trump nominated Paul Atkins to the SEC chair, which we think helped get the price right over that bump. Paul Atkins is a strong crypto advocate, he's co-chair to crypto advocacy organizations in the past, so his nomination really set it off.

Rob Rubin (04:19):

Tyler, what do you think? What has he done with Bitcoin? Has it been working for them?

Tyler Van Dyke (04:23):

Well so far in terms of concrete things, he hasn't done very much. The biggest thing was the executive order that he signed shortly after he was inaugurated that basically had four main parts. The first thing he did was revoked a Biden executive order that established a working group to study things like CBDCs and crypto legislation.

Rob Rubin (04:51):

Because we don't need any legislation or because-

Tyler Van Dyke (04:54):

Well, presumably because-

Rob Rubin (04:55):

Who needs that?

Tyler Van Dyke (04:57):

... presumably because he didn't like the legislation that they were going to come up with.

Rob Rubin (04:58):

Okay.

Tyler Van Dyke (05:02):

The second thing that he did was he explicitly banned the creation of a CBDC.

Rob Rubin (05:08):

Can you just sort of tell everybody what a CBDC is?

Tyler Van Dyke (05:12):

Sure. A CBDC is a central bank digital currency. It is basically-

Rob Rubin (05:16):

Like a stable coin or-

Tyler Van Dyke (05:18):

It's like a stable coin that's issued by the government itself. So-

Rob Rubin (05:23):

So, it's backed by the full faith of the government?

Tyler Van Dyke (05:25):

Yes.

Grace Broadbent (05:26):

People often refer to it as a digital dollar. People might be more familiar with that terms. It really would just be like a dollar just fully digitized.

Rob Rubin (05:37):

So he's banned that? We don't do digital dollars?

Tyler Van Dyke (05:37):

Yeah. He doesn't like it. A lot of republicans typically don't like it, so it's out of here.

Rob Rubin (05:43):

Okay. What else was in the executive order?

Tyler Van Dyke (05:45):

He also established his own working group and set some deadlines for them to review existing regulations and propose new regulations, and presumably also some legislation that would go to the Congress.

Rob Rubin (06:00):

So that seems all sort of fairly standard fare, like the I'm going to shut his working group down and-

Tyler Van Dyke (06:07):

Make my own, yeah.

Rob Rubin (06:07):

That's the thing, right?

Tyler Van Dyke (06:08):

That's very common for a new administration to come in. And then the last thing that the executive order did was try to protect quote, unquote crypto's access to the banking system. This stems from the alleged choke point 2.0 allegations that the industry said the Biden administration and regulators were trying to basically cut them off from the banking system.

Rob Rubin (06:34):

Wasn't that because of the money launderers?

Tyler Van Dyke (06:36):

Because of the money launderers, the FTX explosion, the crypto crash, yeah, all those great things.

Rob Rubin (06:43):

So their order was to stop that so that we don't protect ourselves? Is that what they're ordering?

Tyler Van Dyke (06:50):

Well, it's unclear what specifically it's referring to. The Biden administration never issued an executive order or passed any legislation that said, "We are cutting off the crypto industry from the banking system." Regulators did issue guidance saying to be very careful when you're dealing with crypto, there are rules about how crypto had to be reported. One of the other things that the SEC did after Trump's inauguration, they revoked a guideline that was published during the Biden administration that forced institutions to treat cryptocurrencies like liabilities. That was something that the industry hated, and they have been-

Rob Rubin (07:42):

Aren't they an asset?

Tyler Van Dyke (07:43):

They are now-

Rob Rubin (07:46):

But they're treated like an asset in terms of how investors think of them.

Tyler Van Dyke (07:50):

Yes, we treat them and think of them as assets, but for reporting purposes, the SEC said that you had to treat them like a liability because of how risky they were. And so that has been repealed.

Rob Rubin (08:03):

So a risky asset is a liability?

Tyler Van Dyke (08:05):

Apparently it was, but not anymore.

Grace Broadbent (08:08):

I was just going to add one more thing about the executive order and going back to them banning the CBDC. As part of the wording in that, they did decide that they are going to now prioritize private-backed stable coins, so that we expect the administration really to be pushing this privatized stablecoins instead of that. And so I think we will see some movement towards that in the future as well.

Rob Rubin (08:34):

What's a meme coin and why does Trump have one?

Grace Broadbent (08:38):

Why does he have one is a very good question. A meme coin is basically just any cryptocurrency that is named after a person, a corporation, a figure, a cartoon, an influencer.

Rob Rubin (08:53):

It's a tradable asset though?

Grace Broadbent (08:53):

It is a tradable asset. There's no intrinsic value to it or anything like that. But Trump did launch one a few days before the inauguration.

Rob Rubin (09:02):

But there is a value, right? Like if you can get someone to pay you for it if you buy it, and then you can get someone to pay you for it, it has a value?

Grace Broadbent (09:09):

Yes. I mean it has as much value as any cryptocurrency as opposed to obviously a stable coin is a different conversation. But yes, it has the same value as a Bitcoin theoretically, they're just meme coins tend to be way more volatile as assets. We've seen many launch and fail almost immediately. And we are already seeing that with Trump's meme coin. On the 24 hours around his inauguration, it crashed about 50% from its peak.

Rob Rubin (09:38):

Pump and dump is the story as old as time.

Grace Broadbent (09:41):

Yes. Yes. And Melania Trump has one as well. They launched that about a day after Trump's did. And it's actually interesting, they're now almost starting to push them as a payment method as well. Some of the Trump branded websites that are selling his merch, like his sneakers, his perfume, his watches.

Rob Rubin (10:01):

Oh, so you can pay with Trump coins?

Grace Broadbent (10:03):

You can now. You can buy Trump merch with Trump coin.

Rob Rubin (10:06):

So if you bought a Trump coin, I don't know what they're worth, but let's say they're worth-

Grace Broadbent (10:10):

They're about $17 right now.

Rob Rubin (10:12):

So each Trump coin is worth $17. So if they're selling Trump merch for 10 coins, then when the coin goes up, you get more. When the coin goes down, you get less? Because it's not like buying it with a dollar where the values don't change very much from day to day.

Tyler Van Dyke (10:31):

Yep, exactly. Yeah. The merchandise has a fixed dollar value, and so whatever that calculates out to for the meme coin, that's just what you end up paying.

Rob Rubin (10:42):

So let's just suppose then that a country or an entity decided that they wanted to buy like a zillion container loads full of Trump stuff and they would pay using the Trump meme coin. Could they do that?

Grace Broadbent (10:42):

Yeah.

Tyler Van Dyke (10:59):

Absolutely, yeah.

Grace Broadbent (11:00):

There's no reason not to.

Rob Rubin (11:01):

Who would benefit from that?

Grace Broadbent (11:02):

Trump.

Rob Rubin (11:02):

No.

Grace Broadbent (11:08):

I mean there is no argument for using meme coins as a payment method. It really does not make sense. It's not a viable payment instrument at all.

Rob Rubin (11:17):

But it could be viable for other things?

Grace Broadbent (11:19):

It's viable for investments.

Rob Rubin (11:20):

Like currying favor.

Grace Broadbent (11:22):

Yes. Or that. Absolutely.

Rob Rubin (11:25):

This gets us to our final segment today, the rankings. I'm going to read four different potential outcomes for crypto over the next four years and we're going to rank them from most to least likely to occur. So number one is the one that you think is for sure going to happen, and the number four is something that it might happen, but it's less sure than the first one. So first one is despite an executive order saying otherwise, US launches a digital dollar in the next four years. US establishes a Bitcoin reserve. So now the US government owns Bitcoin as a reserve.

(12:09):

The third is, as we were talking about, the Trump coin. Trump gets in trouble for that. It's violating the Emoluments Clause. He finds that countries and individuals and corporations are actually currying favor with that meme coin and causing a problem. So that's one potential outcome. And then the US is going to greatly expand its Bitcoin mining capabilities as a result of executive action. So Trump is going to decide that minted in America is going to be important or mined in America, so he's going to want to make sure that we're really producing, finding our Bitcoins. So you guys have had a chance to review that. So let's go through and you can put your numbers down on the table here and then we'll go through. So the first one, we can call it a digital dollar before the end of the four years, a Bitcoin reserve, Trump gets in trouble, and there's Bitcoining in the US.

Grace Broadbent (13:09):

Okay, I am ready.

Tyler Van Dyke (13:10):

Wait, Rob, it looks like we're filling this out differently.

Rob Rubin (13:13):

We are supposed to fill them out differently. Different opinions.

Tyler Van Dyke (13:18):

Is four most likely or least likely?

Rob Rubin (13:21):

Least likely.

Tyler Van Dyke (13:21):

Least likely. Okay.

Rob Rubin (13:23):

I think you're just surprised ar my choices, is what you're saying. I think you all both said you put fours as they're not going to have a digital dollar in the next four years, and I said that that's the one that's most likely to occur. And I'm just playing off of the ego of Trump and it's going to turn around before the end of four years that it would be a good thing that he did that for him. So that's why I say one. I think you guys are saying, tell me, it's because of the executive order.

Grace Broadbent (13:58):

And my argument isn't that Trump can't change his mind on the executive order, but I do think Republicans as a whole have stayed firm in the past five or so years that they're very anti-digital dollar solely for maybe privacy concerns. They're scared it would give the government more power to watch your transactions.

Rob Rubin (14:20):

Now I want to go to your number one, Grace, because that's so interesting to me. More Bitcoin mining.

Grace Broadbent (14:26):

So that was one of the many campaign promises Trump gave in the crypto industry. He really wants crypto. He wants all the rest of crypto that is mined to be, quote, made in the US. It kind of goes along with his larger push for basically any good or service, he wants it to be made in the US, a very US-centric approach. And I think that fits into his larger philosophies and I think there's potentially less regulatory pushback on that particular initiative than maybe some of the other ones we are about to discuss, or the digital dollar.

Rob Rubin (15:04):

So the argument about fossil fuels?

Grace Broadbent (15:06):

Yes, but that has never been top of concern in his agenda.

Rob Rubin (15:11):

All right. Now Tyler, you put your number one as the Bitcoin reserve, that the US is going to establish a Bitcoin reserve.

Tyler Van Dyke (15:18):

Yeah. I think of the things that we're choosing between, I think that's the most likely just because it's probably the easiest to do. I am not a lawyer or a legislator. I don't think it requires a bill to be passed for this to happen. The FBI already gets Bitcoin when they like ransomware attacks and things like that, so somewhere presumably the federal government already has a wallet. And so I'm not going to say I think it's definitely going to happen, but I think it has the best odds in this list.

Rob Rubin (16:02):

Right.

Grace Broadbent (16:02):

His executive order did direct agencies to explore it as well, and that was too, crypto advocates were a little sad that it didn't go all the way in establishing one, but at least made the first baby step. So there's progress being made towards it, which is why I put it as number two for me.

Rob Rubin (16:20):

And I had it as number two as well. And we all had between two or three for the Trump gets in trouble for his Trump coin. So, I think we all think no one's going to be too surprised when there's news coming out about somebody buying a lot of it.

Grace Broadbent (16:35):

Yeah, of course, Democratic lawmakers have already taken issue with it. They did so almost immediately, led by Senator Warren. They did send a letter to Treasury department, SEC, other agencies to look into the legal and ethical questions of it. So I don't think it's a matter of will there be concerns around it? It's more so a question of will there be any action?

Rob Rubin (16:35):

Yeah, but will there be an issue, like, "Hey, look what's going on?"

Grace Broadbent (17:06):

Yeah, and will there be any sort of actual action or punishment, and the source is really the question up in the air.

Rob Rubin (17:15):

We've been going back and forth on all this. First I want to just say that I'm going to give up. I put that they were going to set up a digital dollar as number one because I knew you guys were going to make it number four. I was just trying to be contrarian. I don't know if he's going to do that. I sort of think we all agree that a Bitcoin reserve is probably pretty likely, shenanigans are going to happen with the Trump meme coin probably. I wasn't so sure about what role the federal government can play in more Bitcoin mining or that might be more state oriented incentives to create these data farms, data centers to do that. I'm not really sure how it all works. That's why I put mine as number four for that because I don't know how much the federal government can really influence that maybe in partnership with the state.

Grace Broadbent (18:02):

Yeah, I agree. There will be state level actions involved.

Tyler Van Dyke (18:07):

The other thing that we have to consider now is that all of our energy needs to go toward AI now. You have Microsoft reactivating Three Mile Island, which was right outside my hometown, so that was big news when that was announced. And so I think from an investment perspective, people are going to be much more likely to use that power for AI rather than for Bitcoin mining.

Rob Rubin (18:34):

My kids were playing with Chat GPT and then they actually got upset when they realized that they were wasting electricity.

Tyler Van Dyke (18:43):

Very eco-conscious children.

Rob Rubin (18:45):

Right. I don't want to ask it too taxing a question. Before we finish, this has been great, I wanted to talk about what do we think the crypto landscape is actually going to look like at the end of the year. Me personally, I think Bitcoin is as firmly established as the gold standard, the most stable of all, so it's going to be where it is or stronger. What do you guys think?

Grace Broadbent (19:14):

I agree. I think Bitcoin has established itself as the main investment asset. I also think the Trump administration is definitely going to bring more regulatory clarity to the industry and more cooperation that, especially as an analyst, I follow the payments industry super closely, and I definitely think we're going to see a larger crypto payments push, which is going to be interesting. We've already seen the CEO of Bank of America said they're ready to move all in on crypto payments as soon as the regulation is established. So I think we'll see some movement towards that with more financial institutions getting deeper into crypto this year.

Rob Rubin (19:53):

All right. That's going to be really interesting for know your customer in terms of making those payments.

Grace Broadbent (19:58):

Yes.

Rob Rubin (19:59):

Well, I think this has been a fantastic show. I really thought it was a lot of fun to talk about. My brain is spinning right now, trying to think of all the things we've been talking about and what could happen. I want to thank everyone for listening to The Banking and Payment Show, an eMarketer podcast made possible by Zeta Global. Also thank you to our editor, Victoria. Our next episode is on March 11th, so be sure to check it out. See you then. Bye, Grace. Bye, Tyler.

Tyler Van Dyke (20:26):

See you.

Grace Broadbent (20:26):

Bye, guys. Thanks, Rob. This was so fun.