Investors hope the Trump White House will set an agenda that drives a wave of interest from big US institutions which have so far sat on the sidelines.

Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist close to Trump and Elon Musk, one of the incoming president’s biggest backers, said the US “is now on the verge of sensible crypto policy”.

Trump vociferously touted the merits of bitcoin for the US economy during his campaign, supported the creation of a strategic bitcoin reserve and even promoted a new crypto venture backed by his sons.

Many of his inner circle are also pro-crypto. Vice-president-elect JD Vance owns cryptocurrency and the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, Howard Lutnick, heads investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where stablecoin giant Tether holds its assets.

Trump’s win marked “an unbelievably important day for the cryptocurrency industry”, said Mike Novogratz, billionaire founder of crypto group Galaxy, despite backing Kamala Harris’ campaign.

“We’re at the very beginnings of what I think will be 52 weeks … of one piece of good news every week,” he added.

But the crypto industry also planned ahead. Efforts to build a consensus in Washington for clear crypto legislation foundered under the Democrats, as the EU, Singapore and other countries passed their first rules on digital assets.

To secure a more friendly audience in Washington, it spent heavily on influencing other political races – and appears to have succeeded.

A year ago heavyweights including Coinbase, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and payments group Ripple Labs backed Fairshake, a political action committee that targeted anti-crypto politicians, even if few of its adverts mention digital assets. The US$170m war chest made it one of the largest corporate “Super Pacs”.

Among the scalps it claimed this week from the US$135m spent included influential Ohio senator Sherrod Brown. Coinbase lobby group Stand With Crypto estimated there are now 284 pro-crypto politicians in Congress, compared with 132 against it. Fairshake says it has already amassed US$78m for the 2026 midterms.

“Crypto has emerged as a powerful political force and it’s one that will prevent any unfair actions from happening,” said Kristin Smith, chief executive of industry group the Blockchain Association. “This is an incredibly important moment – we have turned a corner,” she added.

But crypto’s greatest ambition is a policy shift at the Securities and Exchange Commission, where chairman Gary Gensler has a sweeping offensive.

Swaths of the industry’s biggest names, including Binance, Coinbase, Ripple and trading group Cumberland DRW have been hit with lawsuits. Without clear rules from Congress, the SEC has relied on its interpretation of existing securities laws and historic legal precedents. Crypto executives have complained it is impossible to follow the agency’s guidance and also comply with its rules.

But that was compounded by an approach, they added, in which the SEC had only limited interaction with targets before firing off legal cases. At a bitcoin conference in July, the crowd roared when Trump vowed to fire Gensler on day one.

“You could replace Gary Gensler with pretty much anybody on earth and it would get better,” said Alex Blume, founder of crypto investment adviser Two Prime.

Trump may find it legally difficult to remove Gensler, whose term ends in July 2026, as the SEC is an independent agency. Even so, Bill Hughes, senior counsel at Consensys, which was hit with a lawsuit this summer, hopes it will “press pause” on outstanding cases. “It’s the SEC’s first and most important job with crypto assets to right a lot of the wrongs of the previous leadership,” he said.

Amy Lynch, president of FrontLine Compliance and former examiner with the SEC, said it was likely the Trump administration would try to make the Commodity Futures Trading Commission the main market regulator, rather than the SEC. “I suspect that will happen and there will be fewer controls around the crypto asset markets.”

“It’s going to be a ‘risk-on environment’, which could lead to some big fraud cases,” she added, predicting fewer enforcement cases and faster settlements.

High on the industry’s wish list is reform of the regulations on how banks must treat digital assets they hold on behalf of customers.

In 2022, the SEC quietly pushed out a dry accounting rule stipulating that institutions holding digital tokens for customers must treat them as liabilities on its own balance sheet. Custodied assets are normally accounted as off-balance sheet items. Congress passed its repeal in the summer but it was vetoed by US President Joe Biden.

With Congress teetering on the brink of total Republican control, crypto executives now hope they have the numbers to ditch the rule and let big banks and fund managers into the market.

“When you bring in the BNYs and the State Streets as custodians … it is gonna unleash a tsunami of institutional participation,” Novogratz said.

Some promises may be hard to keep. Geoff Kendrick, an analyst at Standard Chartered, called the creation of a Bitcoin reserve fund as “a low-probability event”.

Blume cautiously pointed to the faltering success of the Trump family’s crypto project, which has to date sold only 5% of the tokens available.

But he added: “Candidates make a lot of promises when they’re running and I’m hopeful that [Trump] does intend to follow through.”

© The Financial Times