Why the crypto community loves Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for Commerce secretary

Donald Trump’s selection on Tuesday of Howard Lutnick as Commerce secretary brought cheers from the cryptocurrency sector. 

Little surprise there. Lutnick has long advocated for cryptocurrency to be treated on equal footing with other financial assets. “Bitcoin is like gold and should be free trade everywhere in the world,” he said at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville in July. “And as the largest wholesaler in the world, we are going to do everything in our power to make it so. Bitcoin . . . should trade the same as gold everywhere in the world without exception and without limitation.”

As commerce secretary, Lutnick will also be in regular talks with CEOs and the business community and could be an influential evangelist of crypto acceptance. He has certainly made no attempt to hide his enthusiasm over cryptocurrency. His investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, oversees some of the reserve funds for the Tether stablecoin, while many other Wall Street firms have shied away from crypto. He’s also quite bullish on Bitcoin, though has been dismissive of other tokens, saying “they’re just not a thing.”

At that same conference, he bragged that Cantor owned “a shit load of Bitcoin” and announced the launch of a Bitcoin lending program, meant to give “leverage to those who own Bitcoin.” He committed Cantor Fitzgerald to $2 billion in loans as part of the program.

Two months after the conference, Lutnick went on Fox Business and urged regulators to classify Bitcoin as a commodity, which would allow it to be treated the same as gold and oil. In that same interview, he expressed concerns that regulators in the Biden administration were unable to grasp the importance of Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency industry.

“Let’s face it: they don’t even know how to do crypto and digital at all, and they have no idea; they still don’t understand how important it is to get it right,” he said.

Lutnick’s appointment as co-chair of the Trump transition team, before the commerce secretary announcement, was heralded by Alex Grieve, head of government affairs at Paradigm, a crypto investment firm, who wrote in a post on X that Lutnick’s inclusion in the team is “huge for crypto.”

Now, Lutnick, if he is confirmed by the Senate, will oversee Trump’s tariff and trade agenda as well as divisions such as the Census Bureau and the Economic Development Administration. That’s an important financial role, but one that doesn’t have a direct impact on the future of cryptocurrency. It’s not exactly powerless, though. 

The Deploying American Blockchains Act of 2023, which passed the House earlier this year, would give the secretary of commerce the power “to take actions necessary and appropriate to promote the competitiveness of the United States [in] blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology.” The bill is currently in the Senate.

Regardless of the bill’s outcome, Lutnick is a longtime close associate of Trump and his enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies likely had an effect on the president-elect. In May, the Trump campaign began accepting crypto donations and began building what he called a “crypto army” to win over young voters.

He has also won the support of fellow crypto enthusiast Elon Musk, who had lobbied for Lutnick to become Treasury Secretary, writing he would “actually enact change” if he got the job, adding “Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change one way or another.”

Robert F. Kennedy joined in the praise, as well, writing “Bitcoin is the currency of freedom, a hedge against inflation for middle-class Americans, a remedy against the dollar’s downgrade from the world’s reserve currency, and the offramp from a ruinous national debt. Bitcoin will have no stronger advocate than Howard Lutnick.”

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