Vice-president Vance doubles down on crypto support
Vice-President JD Vance addressed the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, promising to eliminate aggressive regulation of the crypto industry and promote a pro-growth legal framework for stablecoins.
Why it matters: Last year then-candidate Donald Trump cemented the Bitcoin community's support for his re-election by becoming the first presidential candidate to appear at the world's largest Bitcoin-focused event.
The big picture: Last year Trump made big news, using the conference's stage to float the idea of a U.S. bitcoin reserve. Vance's speech Wednesday contained no such bombshells.
"Crypto is a hedge against bad policy making from Washington, no matter what party is in control," Vance told the crowd.
"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 added later.
Vance made three points about the policy priorities of the White House, which will sound familiar to anyone who has been following the topic in Congress this year.
"Our administration, we prioritize eliminating the rules, the red tape and lawfare that we saw aimed at crypto by our predecessors. We're ending the weaponization of federal regulations against this community," he said.
"To put it simply, Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is dead and it's not coming back under the Trump administration," Vance said, referring to the name critics have given to what has increasingly looked like a coordinated effort by regulators to keep the crypto industry from accessing traditional banking services.
Since Trump's inauguration, banking regulators have withdrawn guidance they had previously issued that served as the basis for this reluctance by bank supervisors.
Vance said the second priority was to pass stablecoin legislation, which would allow dollar-backed cryptocurrencies to be issued and traded with clear regulatory guardrails in the U.S.
The Trump family's own involvement in the crypto industry, including stablecoins, has been an impediment to moving stablecoin legislation as swiftly as it might have otherwise.
Finally, Vance said the White House supports defining how other digital assets should be regulated with a "market structure" bill, which would define a broad scheme for how crypto assets would be regulated in the U.S.
"We want our fellow Americans to know that crypto and digital assets, and particularly bitcoin, are part of the mainstream economy and are here to stay," Vance said.
The bottom line: Vance signaled that the White House sees alignment between the attendees at Bitcoin 2025 and the administration, by urging them to keep the political pressure up.
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