Brian Armstrong Discusses Bitcoin as Reserve and its implications.
“I think he is excited about it. I mean, he really wants to be the first bitcoin president,” Coinbase (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong told Yahoo Finance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Armstrong met with Trump before and after the election to advocate for the crypto industry.
Armstrong added, “The US actually has reserves in lots of things, gold, oil, I think, like 27 different rare minerals, like palladium and all these things. And so I think the world is moving to a bitcoin standard for money. Any government who holds gold should also hold bitcoin as a reserve.”
At the start of the year, the returning president debuted the Trump coin. Officially called Trump (TRUMP-OFFICIAL-USD), the slogan for the coin is “Join the Trump Community. This is History in the Making!”
The crypto venture was put together by CIC Digital, an affiliate of the Trump organization. CIC Digital and its affiliates own 80% of the supply of the Trump coin. New tokens will be released gradually over the next three years. The affiliates will be paid trading revenue as the tokens are sold.
On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, Melania’s coin (MELANIA-USD) debuted.
In other words, the Trump family stands to profit from the presidency — a stunning maneuver that has government ethics watchers up in arms.
Trump coin quickly rose to a market cap of $73 billion in about 48 hours, surpassing DOGE as the largest meme coin. The market cap of the cryptocurrency has since dropped to $10.2 billion from its launch, according to CoinMarketCap. Melania coin is trading at a market cap of $632 million.
“In our view, the launch of a meme coin by the biggest political figure in the world is a massive paradigm shift in the way US and rest of the world would approach crypto. It signifies a new regulatory era, where governments see crypto as a technology to reach out to the masses directly,” Coinbase (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong said. “The key concern is the need for clearer regulatory frameworks in this rapidly evolving crypto sector. We don’t want people risking their homes on Buttox coin.”
Trump has taken on a friendly view on crypto since campaigning for the White House in 2024. While stopping short of saying he would create a strategic reserve for bitcoin, he has expressed an interest in making the US the “crypto capital” of the world.
To that end, he has appointed crypto advocate Paul Atkins to lead the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) and venture capitalist and former PayPal (PYPL) exec David Sacks as an AI and crypto czar.
“Just the fact that there would even be someone who would be focused on making the United States a leader in crypto, bitcoin mining, and other areas President Trump has talked about is a sea change,” Benchmark Company analyst Mark Palmer said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast.
Palmer sees bitcoin prices hitting $225,000 in 2026.
The warming sentiment toward crypto also includes recent investments from entities that typically favor the more traditional stocks and bonds options. Last May, Wisconsin’s pension fund added bitcoin to its holdings by purchasing more than $160 million of shares in two bitcoin ETFs.
