The man helping Trump make up his mind about crypto policy
The task of turning Trump’s crypto executive order into practical policy has fallen on a little-known Treasury staffer
Hello! We’re delighted to have Veronica Irwin, a crypto regulation and policy journalist based in Brooklyn, back with us today.
Shortly after taking office, President Trump signed an executive order on crypto. Trump’s order called for a report on several key topics to be completed by … today. It’s unclear when (or whether) the report will be published, but Veronica wanted to provide some insight into what it might contain—as well as a look at an unheralded Treasury official who sources say has been instrumental in writing it.
The man behind the curtain
by Veronica Irwin
When it comes to crypto in the second Trump era, two names are nearly ubiquitous: David Sacks, the abrasive venture capitalist-turned AI and Crypto Czar, and former North Carolina Congressional candidate Bo Hines, who serves as Donald Trump’s liaison to the crypto industry. As crypto policy has advanced rapidly over the last few months, their public statements have often been interpreted as bellwethers of President Trump’s own stance on crypto.
But according to our reporting, they have far less policy influence than their positions would suggest. Instead, a working group composed of senior officials from across the executive branch is steering the administration’s crypto policy, with one man in particular at its nexus.
That person is Tyler Williams, a career political operative and crypto policy consultant who has served as Counselor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on digital assets and blockchain technology since late February.
Despite keeping a low profile, Williams has been burning the midnight oil since his appointment drafting the policy positions that inform President Trump’s actions on crypto. As the dedicated policy person coordinating a working group that the president established, he has been tasked with figuring out how best to increase the government’s bitcoin reserves, and shaping the White House’s stance on federal legislation going forward, like the CLARITY Act, which is meant to lay out laws around crypto markets.
Now that Trump has reached a major milestone in signing the GENIUS Act into law, where will his “pro-crypto” administration go next? Williams seems to be drawing a potential roadmap.
Trump’s core crypto team
The working group—formally, the “President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets,” established by Executive Order 14178, which President Trump signed on his third day in office in January—includes Attorney General Pam Bondi, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and SEC Chair Paul Atkins along with eight other senior economic and security officials in the administration.
The executive order mandates that the group produce a report on two topics in particular: deciding how laws should regulate digital assets and how to manage a digital asset stockpile. The order states that today is the deadline for the report to be completed. It does not require that the report be released to the public, but the White House has said it will release it before the end of the month.
Hines will release the report, but he is not its primary author, according to five people who have spoken with both Williams and Hines about the matter. Hines effectively serves as a spokesperson, the sources say. He is present for many of the meetings and often calls them to order, but is not a key decider in the actual contours of policy. Williams, meanwhile, has significant say over the details of topics relevant to the Department of the Treasury in the report and, simultaneously, has taken the lead synthesizing the viewpoints of other departments in the working group and editing the language in the draft report so that all parties agree.
This influence is partly due to Treasury’s role in financial policymaking, but also to Williams’ experience in both the crypto industry and government. Before joining Treasury, Williams was the Head of Regulatory and Legislative Affairs and Regulatory Counsel at the crypto investment and financial services firm Galaxy Digital, and Deputy Assistant Secretary at Treasury during Trump’s first term, amongst several other private and public financial services policy jobs.
Hines “is not a particularly strong policy person—he is waking up every day and putting on a suit and carrying the President’s message. The way I think of him is he’s like a campaign staffer whose job it is to say nice things about crypto. And David Sacks is the guy who gave $80 million or something,” said one crypto executive who has met with the White House and Treasury. “Tyler’s the only person who’s capable and has the centrality to actually drive this [report] to completion.”
Imagining a “bitcoin reserve”
Trump made a lot of promises to crypto fans on the campaign trail, but perhaps the one that has inspired the strongest reactions was his promise to establish a “strategic bitcoin stockpile.” At first, this seemed like just a bitcoin thing. But as often happens in crypto, things quickly got a lot more complicated.
Ripple reportedly attempted to get its token, XRP, added to the reserve plans. To obscure its efforts, Ripple also advocated for the inclusion of other tokens, including ADA and SOL. Trump even posted on his own Truth Social platform that a reserve would include these three tokens, before posting that the reserve would also include bitcoin and ether.
On March 6, Trump signed Executive Order 14233, which created two separate categories: a bitcoin reserve and a “digital asset stockpile.” The order effectively directed the federal government not to sell the crypto it already has in its possession by virtue of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings. It also authorized the Departments of Treasury and Commerce to come up with “budget-neutral” strategies (so that they can be carried out without Congressional approval) for adding more bitcoin to the reserve. It also stated that the federal government would not be acquiring additional amounts of other cryptocurrency tokens.
Williams has been taking meetings with industry representatives eager to pitch him on potential strategies for acquiring bitcoin in a budget-neutral way. In a particularly striking example, former CFTC Chair Chris Giancarlo said last month that he had met with senior Treasury officials—presumably referring to Williams—to propose using an obscure Constitutional provision to authorize crypto firms to hack foreign adversaries for their bitcoin as a lawful act of war.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, an advocacy group in Washington, has publicly advocated for Treasury to use the Exchange Stabilization Fund—a long-standing fund that the department typically uses to buy or sell foreign currencies—to buy bitcoin. Williams has also been pitched on ideas such as re-valuing or selling the gold at Fort Knox or selling altcoins to fund the bitcoin reserve, according to two sources familiar with the conversations.
In addition to the Exchange Stabilization Fund, “there are likely other means of budget-neutral acquisitions that we hope and expect the government to explore across the Treasury and Commerce departments,” said Bitcoin Policy Institute Executive Director Matthew Pines.
At Permissionless IV, a crypto conference in New York held last month, Hines confirmed that such discussions were underway. “We’re fleshing out these ideas with the folks over at Treasury and the folks at Commerce,” he said. “If you read the EO—the fine print—it kicks a lot of the responsibility in terms of producing these ideas over to these inter-agency actors. But we’ll flesh that out amongst the working group and then we’ll move on those [ideas] that are most expeditiously implemented.”
Charting Congress’s next steps
Beyond executive orders, what exactly would Trump like Congress to do about crypto? Williams seems to be in charge of informing him of the options. Specifically, now that the GENIUS Act is signed, the focus is on a piece of legislation meant to define which government regulators have jurisdiction for the various types of crypto asset markets. This is no small question, and the industry and the federal government have been fighting over it for years.
Last week, the House passed a new version of the bill, called the CLARITY Act. But the politics of crypto market structure are much messier than they are for stablecoins, if for no other reason than there are many more types of cryptocurrency tokens than there are stablecoins. Hanging over the debate is a crucial open question: what tokens are subject to securities laws?
Don’t expect the report to be too prescriptive. If it addresses legislation, it will likely stop at celebrating the passage of GENIUS as a win and lay out high-level “principles” for market structure legislation, according to the five sources who have met with Williams’ team. These principles are expected to focus on legal protections for DeFi developers, flexibility for future innovation, and a general encouragement of domestic tech growth. All of the sources Project Glitch spoke with expect that the report will contain few specifics, assuming it is published.
If the White House does choose to push for more specific legislative measures, that would be a big deal, because President Trump could exert pressure on Republican members of Congress to comply. The White House has already shown that it’s willing to exercise this sort of influence.
“It’s a dual process—we’re talking through things as a working group and providing technical feedback to the staffers on the Hill that are devising this new policy,” Hines said at Permissionless. “We’re working together to create a seamless transition into a completely different landscape for the industry itself.”
New agenda items?
Of course, stablecoins and market structure aren’t the only crypto-related issues under Treasury’s purview. For instance, Coin Center Executive Director Peter Van Valkenburgh told Project Glitch that they had approached Treasury with requests to reiterate 2019 FinCEN guidance, which has been widely interpreted to say that blockchain-based apps that don’t take control of customer funds, such as Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash, are not money transmitters. We could see some reference to these issues in the report, depending on how it frames the issue of protecting software developers.
Van Valkenburgh said Coin Center has also had discussions with Treasury to rescind past IRS guidance stipulating that the monetary rewards that cryptocurrency miners receive for their work, called block rewards, should be taxed as income. “It is our hope that their July 22nd report will flag the past block reward guidance as legally incorrect and bad policy so we can start a process of rescinding it,” said Valkenburgh.
There’s a chance the public won’t ever see the report. Trump’s January executive order does not require that it be released or acted upon. However, a White House official has said that it would be released before the end of the month.
“In comparison to other reports that end up on a shelf somewhere, this comes directly from the president in an executive order—and particularly a president who has made it a core part of his policy to focus on crypto,” Coin Center Director of Policy Jason Somensatto said. “Policy in this area is being driven at the White House level, and so their opinions on where things go become really relevant.”
Treasury declined to comment.