The price of bitcoin scaled a fresh all-time high on Wednesday, soaring above $93,000 as cryptocurrency investors continued to cheer the election victory of Donald Trump.
Dogecoin, a meme coin previously backed by Elon Musk, has risen as much as 150% in value since election day. It continued to rise after the president-elect announced that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), a new outside advisory group.
Bitcoin has surged by more than a third since Trump’s win.
Many of his biggest supporters, such as Musk, have deep ties to the crypto industry – and they are expecting large dividends for their loyalty after his victory. Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of Trump’s transition team, is a vocal advocate for the sector and is expected by some to fill Trump’s economic team with fellow crypto-friendly appointees.
For years, the crypto industry has been fighting efforts under the Biden administration to regulate cryptocurrency, which largely operates in a legal gray area. Gary Gensler, the current chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, was seen as an opponent.
Questions about the future of the industry were raised after the fall of FTX and Binance, two cryptocurrency exchanges that were largely respected before it was revealed that company executives, including FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, had defrauded investors.
But crypto’s staunchest advocates threw their weight – and wallets – behind efforts to re-elect Trump and unseat lawmakers unfriendly to the industry. In Ohio, the Democratic senator Sherrod Brown lost his re-election campaign to Bernie Moreno, a blockchain entrepreneur.
“The Biden administration’s war on crypto is coming to an end,” Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, a crypto firm, told the New York Times. “That’s good for America.”
The appointments of Musk and Ramaswamy solidified just how much impact Musk will have on Trump in his second term. Trump said Doge would partner with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and provide “advice and guidance” on “structural referral” along with creating “an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before”.
On his social media platform X, Musk said that he would document all department actions online. “Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know!”