JD Vance and President Trump's Sons Hype Bitcoin at Las Vegas Conference
Vice President JD Vance and the sons of President Donald Trump, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., spoke at the Bitcoin 2025 Conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, hyping the cryptocurrency and promising to do everything in their power to ensure a friendly regulatory environment. And it's just the latest reminder that the Trump regime is all-in on crypto.
Vance was eager to thank the Winklevoss brothers, Tyler and Cameron, who are longtime crypto investors and donated millions to the crypto super PAC Fairshake in the 2024 election cycle. Vance said that many people in Silicon Valley were nervous to support President Trump in his bid to retake the White House and credited the Winklevoss twins as some of the first to really get on board.
'Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, I think they were some of the first big names in Silicon Valley to take that step and a whole host of people followed them. So Cameron and Tyler, thank you for that,' Vance said.
Vance also thanked Coinbase, one of the organizers of the Bitcoin 2025 Conference, and a company that the SEC dropped its investigation into about a month after Trump again took power. The Trump regime has drawn criticism for dropping investigations into powerful people and companies that are seen as friendly to the president, and nobody seems to understand that better than the crypto community, which complained during Joe Biden's tenure that they were being unfairly targeted for being crooks.
Vance told the audience he holds 'a fair amount of bitcoin,' without disclosing an exact number. The vice president previously reported that he held somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of bitcoin, according to financial disclosure paperwork he filed in the summer of 2024, shortly before the election. It's not clear if the VP has purchased more or sold any since that disclosure almost a year ago.
Vance said he was 'eliminating the rules, the red tape, and the lawfare that we saw aimed at crypto by our predecessors,' referring to the Biden administration. And the VP specifically called out former SEC chairman Gary Gensler, long hated among crypto enthusiasts.
'Maybe the most important thing that we did for this community, we reject regulators and we fired Gary Gensler and we're going to fire everybody like him,' Vance told the crowd.
While Vance did his part to assure conference attendees that he was doing everything he could to make sure people like Gensler were no longer able to influence policy, the president's sons leaned into the hype with a much more blunt approach.
'Every single day, people are allocating billions and billions of dollars to it. You know, 0.1 Bitcoin is going to be worth an absolute fortune,' Eric Trump said. The price of 0.1 bitcoin is about $10,700 today.
Asked by a moderator what they thought bitcoin's price would be by 2026, Eric said 'the moon,' while his brother Donald Jr. said it would land somewhere between 150,000 and 175,000 dollars. The current price is hovering around $107,900, near an all-time-high.
Eric Trump made a passing reference to his father's company Trump Media, the owner of Truth Social, which had just announced plans for a $2.5 billion investment in a bitcoin treasury this week. And he insisted 'everyone wants it, nobody wants to get rid of it,' doing his best to pump up the price.
The bitcoin conference will have other speakers for its final day on Thursday, including Paolo Ardoino, the head of stablecoin company Tether. Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the infamous darknet market Silk Road who was sentenced to life in prison and served 11 years before being pardoned by Donald Trump, is also slated to speak Thursday.
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