U.S. market structure legislation is now racing against the clock, crypto operators gave President Donald Trump another $21.5 million, and key regulatory agencies are suddenly all-GOP affairs.
On January 5, Punchbowl News reported that “a bipartisan group” of U.S. senators plans to meet Tuesday to discuss ways of bridging the Democratic-Republican divide on proposed digital market structure legislation. The meeting is reportedly being organized by Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott (R-SC) in a last-ditch effort to achieve consensus before the sand runs out of this hourglass.
The prolonged partisan market structure fight has seen Dems accuse their GOP counterparts of trying to use their majority to pass a market structure bill without Dems’ input, while the GOP has accused Dems of being needlessly obstructionist. Scott’s committee has reportedly scheduled a legislative markup session for January 15, although the official calendar remains blank.
The areas of partisan dispute are legion, including whether or not digital asset exchanges can offer ‘rewards’ to customers holding stablecoins on their platforms; whether decentralized finance (DeFi) developers should be legally liable if their platforms are used for crime; whether Trump and his family should be barred from profiting off crypto projects while Trump is actively pushing to loosen regulatory guardrails; and so much more.
Further complicating matters are the November midterm elections, which have traditionally meant that any legislation that doesn’t make it all the way through Congress and to the president’s desk for signing into law by spring’s end might have to wait ‘til next year.
TD Cowen analysts are already saying chances are good that the market structure football will have to be punted into 2027—and actual implementation of its rules until 2029—but then again, they’ve been saying that for months now.
Scott is clearly eager to get a win for the president ahead of the midterms. But with the Dems liking their odds of taking back control of the House of Representatives—the governing party has lost House seats in 20 of the last 22 midterms and the GOP has a razor-thin majority—they might not be willing to concede much ground on this controversial subject. (The Senate is a much tougher lift, but hey, November’s a long way off.)
PAC your bags for the midterms
Meanwhile, a pair of crypto operators is spending big to remind the president who helped him get elected and what they want in return. A new Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing shows two digital asset firms—Foris Dax and Gemini Trust Company—contributed a combined $21.5 million to MAGA Inc, Trump’s political action committee (PAC). That sum represents around one-fifth of the total that MAGA raised in the second half of 2025.
Foris Dax, the parent company of the Crypto.com exchange, made two separate contributions of $10 million each in September and October. Gemini (NASDAQ: GEMI), the exchange founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, anted up $1.5 million via 1.5 million liquidated USDC stablecoins.
These are by no means the first donations to the Trump cause by either firm. In June 2024, the Winklevii made a $2 million contribution to Trump’s presidential campaign, then cut Trump another mega-check to help pay for his new White House ballroom, and then funded their own pro-Trump PAC with $21 million last August. And that’s in addition to still more millions the twins have given to other pro-crypto PACs like Fairshake.
Crypto.com contributed $10 million to MAGA last February and another $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee last January. But Crypto.com’s most significant contribution has been as an enabling partner for Trump-linked crypto ventures involving Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) (NASDAQ: DJT).
MAGA now has about $300 million to spend, despite the fact that Trump isn’t on the ballot in 2026 and, barring a constitutional amendment, is barred from seeking re-election in 2028. However, he can help fund campaigns for GOP candidates he likes, as well as fund primary challenges to GOP incumbents who’ve annoyed him.
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SEC now a GOP-only operation
With the new year underway, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has officially lost its last Democrat-appointed commissioner. On January 2, SEC Chair Paul Atkins and the two remaining Republican-appointed commissioners thanked Caroline Crenshaw for her “exemplary service” and wished her well “wherever her dedication leads her next.”
Crenshaw, whose reappointment was scuppered in December 2024 when Senate Republicans refused to support her, rang a loud warning bell ahead of her departure. Crenshaw claimed the SEC’s current leadership’s “appetite to deregulate has been rapacious. The analysis of the costs and benefits of our policies has been nonexistent. And the repercussions, I would argue, could be dire.”
Ensuring bipartisan representation on regulatory agencies like the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is one of the sticking points for securing Dem support for market structure legislation. But in further signs of partisan discord, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee, sent a letter to Committee Chair French Hill (R-AR) on December 29 asking why the Committee has yet to hold “a single hearing” with Atkins, despite the SEC chairman having been sworn into office last April.
Waters notes that when she chaired the Committee, Atkins’ predecessor, Gary Gensler, testified twice in his first year on the job. Waters believes it’s all the more important to question Atkins given the SEC’s “rapid, significant, and questionable policy shifts during the Trump Administration, largely accomplished by unilateral action by the Chairman.”
Among the subjects Waters is curious about is the SEC’s “dismissal of major crypto enforcement actions.” Waters claims the individuals and entities who were let off the hook during Atkins’ tenure “had been credibly accused of major violations of our securities laws, including Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Binance, and Justin Sun.”
Waters added that “in some of these cases, the defendants had announced that the SEC had terminated enforcement actions even before the Commission had taken the actual vote to do so. Reports also suggest that the Chairman’s office took an unusually active role in negotiating an end to these cases.”
Alas, Waters can rage, but her party is in the minority (at least, until a new Congress assembles next January), so she cannot compel Hill to act. So file this one under ‘not gonna happen.’ At least, not until 2027.
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CFTC chair adds crypto-friendly chief of staff
Meanwhile, the traditionally five-person leadership team at the CFTC is down to just newly confirmed Chair Michael Selig. Acting-Chair Caroline Pham, who held the fort alone for four months until Selig’s confirmation, officially stepped down on December 22 to join fintech firm Moonpay.
On December 31, Selig announced that Amir Zaidi, a former director of the CFTC’s Division of Market Oversight, would serve as his chief of staff. Selig credited Zaidi with being “instrumental in the historic launch of CFTC-regulated bitcoin futures contracts during President Trump’s first term.”
Assuming market structure legislation passes before this year’s election politicking commences in earnest, the plan is for the CFTC to bear the brunt of most digital asset oversight. Selig said Zaidi “will bring tremendous experience and expertise to the CFTC as it develops fit-for-purpose regulations for our rapidly evolving commodity markets.”
Zaidi logrolled back, praising Selig’s leadership and saying he is “committed to ensuring that the Chairman’s pro-innovation agenda is successfully implemented during this period of rapid transformation in the derivatives markets.”
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BTC shows signs of life
After struggling to break out of a narrow price band below $90,000 for most of December, the BTC token briefly topped $94,000 on January 5, marking five straight days of net gains. The period roughly coincides with the U.S. military snatching Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro (and his wife), but whether that’s cause or coincidence is anyone’s guess.
Whoever’s driving this surge, it’s not retail customers. Google Trends data shows searches for ‘crypto’ enjoying the occasional upward spike over the past week or so, but the longer-term trend is distinctly downward. Searches for ‘bitcoin’ returned similarly grim stats ahead of the new year’s unexplained price rally, a trend mirrored on South Korea’s Naver search engine.
And some experienced traders are warning HODLers and would-be buyers not to get too excited over this price spike, as trading volume remains thinner than a celebrity with an Ozempic sponsorship. Glassnode researchers said BTC spot volume was touching two-year lows, while others are referring to BTC’s on-chain activity as “a ghost town.”
Shortly before New Year’s, crypto influencer Mario Nawfal tweeted that there is “close to no retail interest in crypto right now,” adding that “none of my normie friends or family ask me anything about crypto anymore.” Nawful speculated that, following the $TRUMP/$MELANIA memecoins issued by Trump and his wife one year ago, “it seems that retail lost a lot of faith in the space.”
The $TRUMP token’s fiat price peaked at $73.43 on January 19, shortly after its launch. As of late Monday, the token was worth $5.60 after dipping as low as $4.71 on New Year’s Eve. $MELANIA is faring far worse, with a mid-Monday price of just $0.13, down ~98% since its launch (one day after $TRUMP’s).
A downward trajectory has plagued WLFI, the token issued by the Trump-linked DeFi project World Liberty Financial (WLFI). After peaking at ~$0.40 during its first day of public trading last September, the token was struggling to stay above $0.10 the following month. WLFI was trading just under $0.13 by mid-December and currently sits just above $0.17, but that’s still below its $0.20 initial price.
Yet another Trump-linked token was announced on New Year’s Eve, as TMTG revealed plans to distribute an as-yet unnamed token to its shareholders. The token will be issued on the Cronos network, which is controlled by TMTG’s partner Crypto.com.
While concrete plans haven’t been divulged, TMTG said “beginning in the near future” one new token would be issued for each DJT share held, with “various rewards being made available to token holders periodically throughout the year.” These rewards may include “benefits or discounts tied to Trump Media products such as Truth Social, Truth+, and Truth Predict” (respectively, a social network, a streaming service and a prediction market).
On December 30, TMTG issued five Truth Social-branded exchange-traded funds (ETFs) via its partnership with Yorkville America Equities. TMTG has yet to issue its ‘Truth Social Bitcoin ETF’ or other crypto-focused ETFs via Crypto.com’s broker-dealer arm, Foris Capital US LLC, although TMTG insists they’re coming later this year.
TMTG’s BTC-based treasury currently ranks fifth among all publicly traded digital asset treasury (DAT) firms. However, TMTG acquired its BTC near the token’s all-time high last autumn, putting the average acquisition cost of TMTG’s BTC at $118,529, meaning the value of this treasury is currently more than one-fifth in the red.
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PwC credits Trump for crypto embrace; Bitfinex hacker credits Trump for freedom
You can debate whether Trump is the cause of the crypto market’s rise or fall, but Paul Griggs, senior partner/CEO at the U.S. division of global professional services network PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), appears to be giving the president full credit for the ‘big four’ auditing firm’s decision to ‘lean in’ to working with crypto firms.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Griggs said the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act that Trump signed into law last summer “will create more conviction around leaning into that product and that asset class. The tokenization of things will certainly continue to evolve as well. PwC has to be in that ecosystem.”
Griggs added that Trump appointing crypto-friendly chairs of the CFTC and SEC had helped create the kind of “regulatory rulemaking” that convinced PwC to come off the sidelines.
“We feel a responsibility to be hyper-engaged on both sides of the business. Whether we are doing work in the audit space or doing work in the consulting arena—we do all the above in crypto—we see more and more opportunities coming our way.”
Last spring, PwC signed on as the new auditor of block reward mining leaders MARA Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA). Some other members of the ‘Big Four’ auditing firms—Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and KPMG—proved less hesitant about dipping their toes into the crypto pool. For instance, the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) exchange has been using Deloitte as its auditor since 2020, and KPMG’s Canadian office added BTC and ETH to its balance sheet in 2022.
It will be interesting to see how Tether, issuer of the leading stablecoin USDT, responds to PwC’s pivot. For years, Tether has refused to submit the fiat reserves backing its now over $187 billion in circulating USDT to a third-party audit, instead releasing threadbare attestations (one-day snapshots of Tether-provided data), based on CEO Paolo Ardoino’s claim that Big Four firms were too skittish about associating with crypto firms.
On a somewhat related note, Ilya Lichtenstein, one-half of the duo that hacked the Bitfinex (Tether’s sister company) exchange in 2016, is praising Trump for his early release from prison last week. Lichtenstein was sentenced to five years in prison just over a year ago for his role in the heist, which netted a whopping 119,754 BTC (over 94,000 of which was later recovered).
Lichtenstein used his X account to credit the passage of the First Step Act during Trump’s first term for his early release. The Act takes into account a convict’s behavior in prison and their risk for reoffending while deciding whether early release is justified. Lichtenstein’s partner-in-crime, his wife Heather ‘Razzlekhan’ Morgan, was granted early release from her 18-month sentence last October.
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Watch: What’s ahead for crypto regulation? Highlights from Blockchain Futurist Conference 2025