The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Crypto: Lessons from FTX amidst a changing regulatory landscape

As he is sworn in as President of the United States for a second time, Donald Trump and his nascent administration have begun laying groundwork to fulfill one of his key campaign promises: to make the U.S. a ”bitcoin superpower” and “the crypto capital of the planet.”

In the sixteen years since Bitcoin ushered in the modern era of digital assets, crypto has evolved to become as much a political lightening rod as an alternative bank. Its fans see it as not just expeditious but gatebreaking, a way to access financial products without the interference of centralized banking systems. In the aspirational world of decentralized finance (de-fi), banks don’t get to play gatekeeper. Even now, crypto is the fastest and cheapest way to send money around the globe, its proponents say.

Like Trump, the crypto market is volatile. The value of crypto assets has surged to outrageous highs, only to drop to stunning lows. It’s probably no surprise that crypto has found a fan in Trump, whose viewpoint has swung from both sides of the pendulum. In 2021, Trump took a firm anti-crypto stance, stating digital currencies were dangerous and that “we should be invested in our (U.S. fiat) currency.” Now in 2025, he professes to be a staunch believer.

Last November, when vote tabulations indicated Trump would once again occupy the Oval Office, the value of bitcoin skyrocketed to record highs, hitting more than $100,000 a month later.

Also analogous to the president-elect, the crypto industry has become synonymous with wealth and criminality. Its biggest setback may have been the 2022 collapse of the global cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 16, a day after Trump formally announced his presidential candidacy. It is not just that founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) misappropriated $8 billion in customer funds and defrauded investors out of $1.7 billion. It was also the companies’ ethos that soured the public’s taste. SBF masked a false sense of infallibility behind a smokescreen of quirky precociousness, an aura that set the tone at his companies.