When Trump met crypto
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 29.8K Ratings
🗓️ 27 June 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There are memecoins for Trump and the first lady. They own a stablecoin, a bitcoin mining operation, and a crypto financial services company. And, at the Bitcoin 2025 conference, Trump's media group announced they're raising 2.5 billion dollars from investors to buy bitcoin.
At that same conference, speakers included two White House advisors, two sons of the US president, the son of the U.S. Commerce Secretary, and a Trump appointee to the Securities and Exchange Commission. For a cryptocurrency built on independence from big government, this was a swerve.
So, what happens when the President of the United States showers his love on the crypto community ... while also becoming a crypto entrepreneur himself? We follow along as Trump Inc.'s Ilya Marritz and Andrea Bernstein spend three days at the Las Vegas conference center where convicts are cheered, oversight and regulation are booed, and the separation of crypto and state no longer applies.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:08.3 | Back at the end of May, I went to a bar in Greenwich Village in New York City. |
| 0:12.2 | Hi, pleasure to meet you. |
| 0:13.9 | Welcome, welcome, welcome. |
| 0:15.4 | It's a Bitcoin bar where you can buy an actual beer with virtual currency. |
| 0:20.6 | This is a dive bar. Yeah, but it looks really nice. I virtual currency. This is a dive bar. |
| 0:21.8 | Yeah, but it looks really nice. |
| 0:23.3 | I would say we're a luxury dive bar. |
| 0:25.1 | So, you know, dive bars are approachable places for everybody. |
| 0:29.3 | The first person I mean is a guy named Mike Germano. |
| 0:32.0 | He's one of the people that runs this place. |
| 0:34.1 | It's called Hubkey, and it's not normally open for lunch, but it is today because so many |
| 0:39.0 | people are here. But we're a little extra special Italian back there because it's pizza day, |
| 0:43.5 | the most important holiday in the Bitcoin calendar. |
| 0:47.4 | Today, everyone is particularly jazzed because it's the 15th anniversary of the very first time |
| 0:53.4 | someone used Bitcoin to buy a thing, |
| 0:56.1 | and that thing was pizza. |
| 0:58.5 | There are stacks of pizza boxes in the back room where people are eating, and I can smell the pies. |
| 1:04.2 | But there is another reason why all these people are at the bar on this particular day. |
| 1:09.5 | They're kind of like pilgrims, stopping at this |
| 1:12.3 | way station on a journey to a much bigger gathering. One guy even came here from Singapore. |
| 1:18.4 | Their destination, the most important event of the year for Bitcoiners, the Bitcoin 2025 conference |
... |
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