Fangs VS Friendlies
Neither Trump's nor Biden's Era Rules Helped Fix Crypto's Regulatory Problem
The other day I was trolling through LinkedIn when I saw a comment that made me pause. I don’t remember the exact wording, but the gist was something like this:
“I’m mad at President Trump because he ‘defanged’ previous crypto regulation so he and his friends could get rich selling coins and buying Bitcoin.”
After spending two years studying crypto, that kind of take makes me stop and think. Not because it is completely beyond criticism, but because it feels like loaded rage bait more than an honest description of the regulatory landscape.
I don't intend to take a stance. In fact, I believe both the Biden and Trump administrations have not met expectations.
Both administrations left large holes, mixed signals, and legal confusion that have slowed crypto innovation and development in the United States. The difference is not that one side solved the problem and the other side destroyed it. The difference is that each side failed in a different way.
Under Biden, crypto policy often felt like enforcement-heavy patchwork. Agencies tried to apply old rules to a new asset class, which created uncertainty around who had authority, what exactly needed to be reported, and what actually counted as a security, a payment instrument, or a commodity. That kind of environment can create the illusion of toughness, but it does not create a clean, workable framework. In practice, it often felt more like a band-aid than a real solution.
And the test cases back that up.
Take tokenized real estate. The St. Regis Aspen tokenization was supposed to show what was possible: real-world assets, blockchain rails, and the promise of secondary-market liquidity. But the actual outcome was much messier. Coverage of the project shows that the initial offering required a broker-dealer setup and a compliant ATS just to function, while secondary trading remained thin and underdeveloped because adoption, investor education, and market plumbing never caught up. That is not a functioning capital market. That is a proof of concept trying to become an infrastructure layer without the legal and market support it needs.
Stablecoins exhibit the same issue from a different perspective. On paper, a strong issuer with real market demand should be able to compete if the framework is well designed. But the GENIUS Act-era structure pushed Tether into building a separate U.S.-focused product, USAT, because the U.S. regime effectively limited how a major offshore stablecoin could participate in American markets. That may be defensible as policy, but it also shows how regulation can force a well-capitalized player into a redesign rather than into seamless compliance.
And that’s where the “safety” argument starts to become slippery. If the rules are so fragmented or narrow that they block beneficial actors, slow legitimate products, and still leave major edge cases unresolved, then calling that “safety” is a stretch. It may be control, but it is not necessarily progress.
Under Trump, the tone has been more openly pro-crypto and more willing to pull back on the regulation-by-enforcement model. That has made things feel clearer in some respects, especially for firms trying to build around stablecoins, trading, and tokenized products. But clarity is not the same thing as completeness. A framework can be more permissive and still leave major edge cases unresolved, especially around reserve quality, custody, secondary-market liquidity, and the status of real-world asset tokens.
And again, the test cases matter.
If you want to know whether the U.S. has built a real token market, look at the secondary resale problem. If investors can buy a token tied to an income-producing asset but still struggle to exit because the market is too thin, too restricted, or too legally awkward to support ordinary trading, then the ecosystem is still missing core infrastructure. The St. Regis case is a good example of that gap.
If you want to know whether the stablecoin framework is complete, ask whether the rules clearly define reserve quality, redemption mechanics, and the competitive treatment of domestic versus offshore issuers. The answer, even after newer legislation, is still no. The regime is more defined than before, but the edge cases remain exactly where the uncertainty lives.
If you want to know whether regulatory clarity alone resolves the problem, look at institutional adoption. Even when there is more optimism, firms still face overlapping federal and state rules, delayed legislation, and a patchwork of compliance demands. That kind of environment can produce innovation at the margins, but it does not produce the kind of durable, scalable infrastructure the U.S. should want.
So no, I don’t buy the simplistic story that Trump “defanged” crypto regulation in some cynical effort to enrich himself and his circle. While this may be a satisfying slogan, it overlooks the larger issue. The real story is that both administrations have left the United States with a crypto regime that is too unclear to reliably build on and too incomplete to genuinely protect people.
That, to me, is the more serious failure.
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Tyler Kreiling, WealthNWisdom, Founder and Head Editor
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