September 9, 2025 • 15 mins
US President Donald Trump was once skeptical of digital assets, saying Bitcoin “seems like a scam” and that crypto’s value was “based on thin air.”
Now, cryptocurrency is at the centre of both his economic agenda, and his personal wealth.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has put out executive orders supporting the industry, expanding the government’s use of digital assets, and paving the way for retirement funds to invest in cryptocurrencies – all while his administration dismantles the regulations that keep the industry in check.
Today, tech and power reporter for The Guardian Nick Robins-Early, on how Trump is using the presidency to push crypto – all while building a sprawling crypto empire.
This is part one of a two-part interview.
If you enjoy 7am, the best way you can support us is by making a contribution at 7ampodcast.com.au/support.
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Guest: Tech and power reporter for The Guardian, Nick Robins-Early
Photo: AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven Am. Donald
trub once called cryptocurrency a scam. Now it's at the
center of both his economic agenda and his personal wealth. Recently,
he signed an executive order that allows retirement funds to
(00:21):
invest in crypto, while his administration dismantles the regulations that
once kept the industry in check. Today, tech and power
reporter for The Guardian, Nick Robins early on how Trump
is using the presidency to push crypto, all while building
a sprawling crypto empire. It's Wednesday, September ten. Nick, You've
(00:49):
been reporting on the executive order that Trump signed a
few weeks ago which will allow crypto and real estate
investments into retirement funds. Tell me how it would work.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
That's right. So on August seventh of this year, Trump
signed an executive order which directed the Labor Treasury and
the SEC to essentially draw this pathway so that four
oh one K retirement plans can offer funds with what
it called alternative assets.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
A new executive order by President Trump opens the door
for millions of Americans saving for retirement through a four
to one K who may soon be able to invest
in high risk assets like private equity or cryptocurrency.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
And what that really means is that it would allow
for fund managers to potentially tap into trillions of dollars
of Americans retirement savings, putting them into digital asset funds
of crypto and other holdings that traditionally these retirement funds
have strayed away from.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
This order directs the sec, Labor and Treasury departments to
help investors get access to those ass's by revising regulations
in guidance now.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
In twenty twenty two, the Department of Labor had this
long standing warning that it should use extreme care before
adding crypto to investment menus and retirement accounts, and this
was part of a sort of earlier more cautious stance
to the industry because the industry was rife with fraud.
It was something that was viewed as a very high
(02:26):
risk investment. And then in May that warning was now
downgraded to a neutral stance.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
A trillion of assets held in four oh one k
plans have not had access to bitcoin until now, as
the US Department of Labor reverses its earlier caution about
including crypto investments in people's retirement savings.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So that red flag has been really taken away, and
it gives this sort of impetus for a wide range
of funds to look into digital assets in a way
that they really haven't done before.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Right, but the sort of genuine consensus that cryptocurrency is
still a very risky asset. So why is the wad
HAS doing this? What does the administration said?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
The way that they've been talking about it is that
they're saying that it's democratizing access to these digital assets.
They say that institutions are already using these assets and
workers should have more choice. They are implying in some
of the language that there could be greater returns from
crypto and from these assets. They are essentially just saying
(03:34):
there's fewer guidelines on what to do with it, and
people can choose their own adventure, despite it being a
very risky and still in the grand scheme of things,
untested and unfamiliar asset for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
So what impact do you think this will have on
that industry?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Well, I think you know already it is shaking things
up to quite a large degree. There's been caution from
some investment management giants saying, you know, well, we need
to wait and see how this is going to shake out.
The order gives the Department of Labor one hundred and
eighty days to review the rules, and there's experts who
(04:16):
say that a lot of the immediate changes aren't going
to be felt. But you have private market giants and
crypto funds seeing this as a huge new distribution pipe.
You have eight point seven trillion sitting in retirement funds.
It's just a lot of money to draw from, and
even if a small fraction of that goes into crypto,
(04:38):
it's a really big deal. We've already seen some you know,
investment managers like State Street and Vanguard announced partnerships with
alternative asset managers like Apollo Global and Blackstone, which have
been more up and invested in this industry. And they're
planning to start offering private equity focused retirement funds that
(05:01):
would potentially pour money into sectors that we haven't really
seen before.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
So how does his Street with Trump's broadest strategy to
loosen restrictions and my conditions more favorable to crypti currencies.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, this is part of sort of a broader shift
among the Trump administration and from Trump hisself to crypto.
He has marketed himself as an incredibly crypto friendly president,
which is actually kind of an interesting turnaround from how
(05:35):
you previously describe crypto, saying that he thought bitcoin was
kind of a scam a bunch of years ago. But
these days he is courting this industry. He is taking
crypto donations, and he is hosting crypto events, trying to
say that the United States is going to be the
(05:57):
crypto country, that it is going to be the hub
for this, that it's going to be an incredibly friendly environment.
Speaker 6 (06:04):
Last year, I promised to make America the bitcoin superpower
of the world and the crypto capital of the planet,
and we're taking historic action to deliver on that promise.
As you know the table.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
This is the sort of shift that's gone under the
Trump administration after you had more caution under Biden, given
that there was a huge number of massive crypto fraud
scandals and there was understandable hesitance about not letting this
industry sort of run outside of regulations. But it is
(06:38):
just a much more lax regulatory environment that Trump is
building now.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Coming up Trump's crypto appointments and the lobbying behind the
industry backed genius build Nick this executive order is one
step that the Trump administration has taken towards reshaping the
financial system in fivor of crypto currencies. Can you tell
(07:07):
me what other moves we've seen from the administration.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, it's come in bits and pieces, but there's a
steady drumbeat of different policies and new regulations and new
appointments under Trump. He appointed a cryptosar last week.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Trump named David Sachs as his White House AI and
cryptos are in a statement, Trump says Sacks will help
guide policy on areas quote critical to the future of
American competitiveness.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
He's created a crypto working group. He has essentially turned
back a lot of the Biden era regulations and stipulations
and guidance around crypto.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
My administration also is working to end the federal bureaucracy's
war on crypto, which was really going on pretty wildly
doing Biden until the election came about.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
He's pushed some executive orders that are very crypto friendly
that the crypto community cares a lot about. Notably, he
was really advocating for the Genius Act, which was a
crypto backed bill that aimed at changing regulations.
Speaker 6 (08:10):
The Genius Act creates a clear and simple regulatory framework
to establish and unleash the immense promise of dollar backed
stable coins. This could be perhaps the greatest revolution in
financial technology since the birth of the Internet itself.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And then you have even some investigations against crypto companies
and entrepreneurs that have been affected by Trump. He paused
the case against Justin's Sun, who's a Chinese born crypto
billionaire who has served as the prime minister of a
self proclaimed micronation and is involved in a number of
(08:51):
potentially investigation worthy crypto endeavors, And when the SEC was
investigating him, the SEC under Trump paused that case. So
a wide range of things that have happened under Trump
in favor of the cryptocurrency community and in favor of
(09:11):
more friendly environment for them.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Nick, you mentioned something called the Genius Act. Can you
tell us a little bit about it? That Act?
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Yes, I should say that the Genius Act it stands
for guiding and establishing national innovation for US stable coins.
So stable coins are coins that are pegged to the
US dollar and are intended to have a sort of
less fluctuating value than some of the meme coins that
(09:44):
you might see shoot up in value and then crash
days later. And the Genius Act, what it's meant to
do is establish these safeguards and create a regulatory environment
that will essentially protect consumers again insolvency against fraud. And
so that was a long standing bill that was favored
(10:10):
by the crypto industry because it would sort of codify
a bunch of things that had been a little unclear before.
They spent a lot of money on this. They spent
tens and tens of millions of dollars in lobbying for
favorable candidates backing this. It did end up passing, and
(10:31):
Trump signed it into law last month. So the way
that the Trump administration frames it is that it will
lead the global digital currency revolution and institute a golden
age of cryptocurrency in America. Right.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So, one of the things about crypti currency though, was
it just isn't volatile. It's also wake when it comes
to invested protections. What are there maindstreaming crypti currencies in
these ways for regular every di investors.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, well, we've seen a little taste of what happens
in the past when so many regular, average investors, everyday
folk get involved in the crypto industry, you can have
on a base level these sort of pump and dump
schemes where everybody buys into something and then the creator
(11:20):
of a mean coin just yanks out all of their
share and it crashes and people are left holding the bag.
And then you have bigger firms that we have seen
with Sam Bagman Freed's FTX.
Speaker 7 (11:33):
To the last fifteen minutes or so FTX finally for
chapter eleven bankruptcy, the company's controversial chief executive, Sam Bankman
Freed resigning a CEO and will remain to assist in
an orderly transition.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
You had billions of dollars of fraud, and you had
one of the most important crypto exchanges in the world,
which recruited so much attention from media, from politicians, from
everyday folk to invest and to trust them, and then
it turned out to be a massive scam.
Speaker 8 (12:06):
But we begin with Sam Bankminfreed now facing eight counts
of conspiracy and fraud charges in the US after being
arrested in the Bahamas. The founder of the cryptocurrency company
FTX also faces civil fraud charges in connection with the
multi billion dollar collapse of his company.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
They were cooking the books and moving around money and
perpetrating wirefraud and sam bankmin Freed is now in jail
for a long time because of that. You know, I
think that there was a lot of concerns in twenty
twenty two, twenty twenty three around how much of the
economy was being invested into crypto and whether it would
have this sort of contagion effect where you know, something
(12:44):
like FTX crashing because of a lack of regulations could
tank the whole economy. That is obviously not what happened.
It was fairly siloed and this broader contagion from FTX
didn't really hit other sectors of the economy. Now, as
the economy in the years since becomes even more intertwined
(13:05):
with crypto, then you have to consider whether the risk
becomes greater and whether if you have more and more
average people who are invested in more and more potentially
risky crypto firms, then you are starting to compound that risk.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
So, given that, is there a risk that crypti could
have detrimental impacts from the economy rule.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
I think it's an unknown At this point. We don't
really have enough information how much of you retirement funds
will be poured into these industries. We don't know a
lot about just the way that this is going to
shake up. There's a lot of people who can see
some benefits to this. But as much as crypto is
(13:53):
advertised as this sort of gold rush pile of magic
beings that anybody can access, it is a industry where
connections matter, knowledge matters, and not everybody who just kind
of throws in money off the street is necessarily going
(14:15):
to make money or necessarily going to be protected. And
in fact, when you look at the people who do
end up losing money over crypto, it's often average, workaday
people who have seen the promises of cryptodillionaires and believed
them and wound up losing quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
This is the first part of a two party to view.
In the next episode, Nick detells how much Donald Trump
and his family have personally made through the crypto investments.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
You know, how much has he made? Like with everything Trump,
it's just buried behind a lot of smoke and mirrors
and potentially false statements. I think we can safely say
he's made more money off of crypto than any US
president has made in history, off of any other asset,
off of any business enterprise. You know we are. We
(15:17):
are very very far from Jimmy Carter selling his peanut farm.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
It's called How Trump built a crypto Empire at Athene.
That's in your fate now,
I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven Am. Donald
trub once called cryptocurrency a scam. Now it's at the
center of both his economic agenda and his personal wealth. Recently,
he signed an executive order that allows retirement funds to
(00:21):
invest in crypto, while his administration dismantles the regulations that
once kept the industry in check. Today, tech and power
reporter for The Guardian, Nick Robins early on how Trump
is using the presidency to push crypto, all while building
a sprawling crypto empire. It's Wednesday, September ten. Nick, You've
(00:49):
been reporting on the executive order that Trump signed a
few weeks ago which will allow crypto and real estate
investments into retirement funds. Tell me how it would work.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
That's right. So on August seventh of this year, Trump
signed an executive order which directed the Labor Treasury and
the SEC to essentially draw this pathway so that four
oh one K retirement plans can offer funds with what
it called alternative assets.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
A new executive order by President Trump opens the door
for millions of Americans saving for retirement through a four
to one K who may soon be able to invest
in high risk assets like private equity or cryptocurrency.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
And what that really means is that it would allow
for fund managers to potentially tap into trillions of dollars
of Americans retirement savings, putting them into digital asset funds
of crypto and other holdings that traditionally these retirement funds
have strayed away from.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
This order directs the sec, Labor and Treasury departments to
help investors get access to those ass's by revising regulations
in guidance now.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
In twenty twenty two, the Department of Labor had this
long standing warning that it should use extreme care before
adding crypto to investment menus and retirement accounts, and this
was part of a sort of earlier more cautious stance
to the industry because the industry was rife with fraud.
It was something that was viewed as a very high
(02:26):
risk investment. And then in May that warning was now
downgraded to a neutral stance.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
A trillion of assets held in four oh one k
plans have not had access to bitcoin until now, as
the US Department of Labor reverses its earlier caution about
including crypto investments in people's retirement savings.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So that red flag has been really taken away, and
it gives this sort of impetus for a wide range
of funds to look into digital assets in a way
that they really haven't done before.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Right, but the sort of genuine consensus that cryptocurrency is
still a very risky asset. So why is the wad
HAS doing this? What does the administration said?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
The way that they've been talking about it is that
they're saying that it's democratizing access to these digital assets.
They say that institutions are already using these assets and
workers should have more choice. They are implying in some
of the language that there could be greater returns from
crypto and from these assets. They are essentially just saying
(03:34):
there's fewer guidelines on what to do with it, and
people can choose their own adventure, despite it being a
very risky and still in the grand scheme of things,
untested and unfamiliar asset for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
So what impact do you think this will have on
that industry?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Well, I think you know already it is shaking things
up to quite a large degree. There's been caution from
some investment management giants saying, you know, well, we need
to wait and see how this is going to shake out.
The order gives the Department of Labor one hundred and
eighty days to review the rules, and there's experts who
(04:16):
say that a lot of the immediate changes aren't going
to be felt. But you have private market giants and
crypto funds seeing this as a huge new distribution pipe.
You have eight point seven trillion sitting in retirement funds.
It's just a lot of money to draw from, and
even if a small fraction of that goes into crypto,
(04:38):
it's a really big deal. We've already seen some you know,
investment managers like State Street and Vanguard announced partnerships with
alternative asset managers like Apollo Global and Blackstone, which have
been more up and invested in this industry. And they're
planning to start offering private equity focused retirement funds that
(05:01):
would potentially pour money into sectors that we haven't really
seen before.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
So how does his Street with Trump's broadest strategy to
loosen restrictions and my conditions more favorable to crypti currencies.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, this is part of sort of a broader shift
among the Trump administration and from Trump hisself to crypto.
He has marketed himself as an incredibly crypto friendly president,
which is actually kind of an interesting turnaround from how
(05:35):
you previously describe crypto, saying that he thought bitcoin was
kind of a scam a bunch of years ago. But
these days he is courting this industry. He is taking
crypto donations, and he is hosting crypto events, trying to
say that the United States is going to be the
(05:57):
crypto country, that it is going to be the hub
for this, that it's going to be an incredibly friendly environment.
Speaker 6 (06:04):
Last year, I promised to make America the bitcoin superpower
of the world and the crypto capital of the planet,
and we're taking historic action to deliver on that promise.
As you know the table.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
This is the sort of shift that's gone under the
Trump administration after you had more caution under Biden, given
that there was a huge number of massive crypto fraud
scandals and there was understandable hesitance about not letting this
industry sort of run outside of regulations. But it is
(06:38):
just a much more lax regulatory environment that Trump is
building now.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Coming up Trump's crypto appointments and the lobbying behind the
industry backed genius build Nick this executive order is one
step that the Trump administration has taken towards reshaping the
financial system in fivor of crypto currencies. Can you tell
(07:07):
me what other moves we've seen from the administration.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, it's come in bits and pieces, but there's a
steady drumbeat of different policies and new regulations and new
appointments under Trump. He appointed a cryptosar last week.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Trump named David Sachs as his White House AI and
cryptos are in a statement, Trump says Sacks will help
guide policy on areas quote critical to the future of
American competitiveness.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
He's created a crypto working group. He has essentially turned
back a lot of the Biden era regulations and stipulations
and guidance around crypto.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
My administration also is working to end the federal bureaucracy's
war on crypto, which was really going on pretty wildly
doing Biden until the election came about.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
He's pushed some executive orders that are very crypto friendly
that the crypto community cares a lot about. Notably, he
was really advocating for the Genius Act, which was a
crypto backed bill that aimed at changing regulations.
Speaker 6 (08:10):
The Genius Act creates a clear and simple regulatory framework
to establish and unleash the immense promise of dollar backed
stable coins. This could be perhaps the greatest revolution in
financial technology since the birth of the Internet itself.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And then you have even some investigations against crypto companies
and entrepreneurs that have been affected by Trump. He paused
the case against Justin's Sun, who's a Chinese born crypto
billionaire who has served as the prime minister of a
self proclaimed micronation and is involved in a number of
(08:51):
potentially investigation worthy crypto endeavors, And when the SEC was
investigating him, the SEC under Trump paused that case. So
a wide range of things that have happened under Trump
in favor of the cryptocurrency community and in favor of
(09:11):
more friendly environment for them.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Nick, you mentioned something called the Genius Act. Can you
tell us a little bit about it? That Act?
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Yes, I should say that the Genius Act it stands
for guiding and establishing national innovation for US stable coins.
So stable coins are coins that are pegged to the
US dollar and are intended to have a sort of
less fluctuating value than some of the meme coins that
(09:44):
you might see shoot up in value and then crash
days later. And the Genius Act, what it's meant to
do is establish these safeguards and create a regulatory environment
that will essentially protect consumers again insolvency against fraud. And
so that was a long standing bill that was favored
(10:10):
by the crypto industry because it would sort of codify
a bunch of things that had been a little unclear before.
They spent a lot of money on this. They spent
tens and tens of millions of dollars in lobbying for
favorable candidates backing this. It did end up passing, and
(10:31):
Trump signed it into law last month. So the way
that the Trump administration frames it is that it will
lead the global digital currency revolution and institute a golden
age of cryptocurrency in America. Right.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So, one of the things about crypti currency though, was
it just isn't volatile. It's also wake when it comes
to invested protections. What are there maindstreaming crypti currencies in
these ways for regular every di investors.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, well, we've seen a little taste of what happens
in the past when so many regular, average investors, everyday
folk get involved in the crypto industry, you can have
on a base level these sort of pump and dump
schemes where everybody buys into something and then the creator
(11:20):
of a mean coin just yanks out all of their
share and it crashes and people are left holding the bag.
And then you have bigger firms that we have seen
with Sam Bagman Freed's FTX.
Speaker 7 (11:33):
To the last fifteen minutes or so FTX finally for
chapter eleven bankruptcy, the company's controversial chief executive, Sam Bankman
Freed resigning a CEO and will remain to assist in
an orderly transition.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
You had billions of dollars of fraud, and you had
one of the most important crypto exchanges in the world,
which recruited so much attention from media, from politicians, from
everyday folk to invest and to trust them, and then
it turned out to be a massive scam.
Speaker 8 (12:06):
But we begin with Sam Bankminfreed now facing eight counts
of conspiracy and fraud charges in the US after being
arrested in the Bahamas. The founder of the cryptocurrency company
FTX also faces civil fraud charges in connection with the
multi billion dollar collapse of his company.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
They were cooking the books and moving around money and
perpetrating wirefraud and sam bankmin Freed is now in jail
for a long time because of that. You know, I
think that there was a lot of concerns in twenty
twenty two, twenty twenty three around how much of the
economy was being invested into crypto and whether it would
have this sort of contagion effect where you know, something
(12:44):
like FTX crashing because of a lack of regulations could
tank the whole economy. That is obviously not what happened.
It was fairly siloed and this broader contagion from FTX
didn't really hit other sectors of the economy. Now, as
the economy in the years since becomes even more intertwined
(13:05):
with crypto, then you have to consider whether the risk
becomes greater and whether if you have more and more
average people who are invested in more and more potentially
risky crypto firms, then you are starting to compound that risk.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
So, given that, is there a risk that crypti could
have detrimental impacts from the economy rule.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
I think it's an unknown At this point. We don't
really have enough information how much of you retirement funds
will be poured into these industries. We don't know a
lot about just the way that this is going to
shake up. There's a lot of people who can see
some benefits to this. But as much as crypto is
(13:53):
advertised as this sort of gold rush pile of magic
beings that anybody can access, it is a industry where
connections matter, knowledge matters, and not everybody who just kind
of throws in money off the street is necessarily going
(14:15):
to make money or necessarily going to be protected. And
in fact, when you look at the people who do
end up losing money over crypto, it's often average, workaday
people who have seen the promises of cryptodillionaires and believed
them and wound up losing quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
This is the first part of a two party to view.
In the next episode, Nick detells how much Donald Trump
and his family have personally made through the crypto investments.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
You know, how much has he made? Like with everything Trump,
it's just buried behind a lot of smoke and mirrors
and potentially false statements. I think we can safely say
he's made more money off of crypto than any US
president has made in history, off of any other asset,
off of any business enterprise. You know we are. We
(15:17):
are very very far from Jimmy Carter selling his peanut farm.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
It's called How Trump built a crypto Empire at Athene.
That's in your fate now,
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