Vice President JD Vance laid out explicit White House support for the cryptocurrency industry in a keynote speech Wednesday at a Bitcoin conference.
“After four years of mistreatment and outright hostility led by Democrat regulators, lawmakers in this country have a choice: Will we lead our nation into a future of financial sovereignty, of innovation and of prosperity, or will we let unelected bureaucrats and our competitors write the rules for us?” Vance said to the audience at the Bitcoin 2025 Conference in Las Vegas.
“I’m here today to say loud and clear: With President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally in the White House,” he continued.
Vance is personally familiar with crypto: In August 2024 financial disclosures, Vance reported owning between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Bitcoin. He has also been a public supporter of crypto for years, and he made that support explicit in his speech.
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President Donald Trump’s private business interests are increasingly tied up in crypto. On Tuesday, Trump Media & Technology Group announced it would raise $2.5 billion to invest in Bitcoin. Last month, Trump Media announced a deal with a crypto trading platform to launch a series of exchange-traded funds. It marks some change for the business strategy of the company: Trump Media is best known as the parent of social media platform Truth Social.
Trump also attended a Virginia gala earlier this month for the top 250 buyers of his “memecoin,” $TRUMP, which launched in January. Vance seemingly alluded to the coin on Wednesday, joking in his introduction that the conference’s crowd had high energy and, “I promise I’m not just saying that to juice my own memecoins.”
Vance said the administration has a few “substantive” steps it will take on digital currencies, starting with “eliminating the rules, the red tape and the lawfare that we saw aimed at crypto by our predecessors.”
“This is my vow to every single person here: You will never see this administration trying to handicap your community or diminish the impact it’s had on the economy. Instead, we reject the Biden administration’s legacy of death by 1,000 enforcement actions. We reject regulators,” he said.
Vance’s second step in his speech was a framework for stablecoins, and he loudly supported the GENIUS Act, a bill in Congress that would regulate stablecoins. “President Trump will sign it into law the minute it comes across his desk,” he said.
Vance, however, also painted digital assets as protection from the government itself.
“Crypto is a hedge against bad policy making from Washington, no matter what party is in control. It’s a hedge against skyrocketing inflation, which has eroded the real savings rate of Americans over the last four years. And as you all know well, it’s a hedge against the private sector that’s increasingly willing to discriminate against consumers on the basis of their basic beliefs, including their politics,” Vance said.
The third step Vance outlined was to “enact a transparent and tailored regulatory framework for digital assets.”
“The consistent fear that I hear is that there’s still this perception that digital assets are not welcome in the mainstream economy, and let me promise you that our effort to change the policy is purely about changing that,” he said.
Vance also connected his crypto priorities to broader Republican messaging around keeping industry stateside and concerns about China.
“If the Communist Republic of China is leaning away from Bitcoin, then maybe the United States ought to be leaning into Bitcoin,” Vance said midway through his speech.
The Bitcoin conference is becoming a fixture for Republican politicians: President Donald Trump was the headline speaker last year. Two of Trump’s children are also set to speak at the conference, along with Trump campaigner Chris LaCivita, White House administrators David Sacks and Bo Hines and GOP members of the House of Representatives. The conference was actually the second Las Vegas event in as many days that Vance headlined. On Tuesday night, he was the featured speaker at a political fundraiser for MAGA Inc., where a $1 million donation was required to secure a ticket. The event was first reported by The Washington Post.
Some Congressional Democrats are hoping to force Republicans to vote “on an amendment prohibiting the president and other officials from profiting off stablecoins as part of the GENIUS Act,” as NOTUS previously reported.
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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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