Bitcoin Will Have Regulatory Clarity by Midyear, Promises Trump

On his first day in office, Trump made a bold promise: Bitcoin will have regulatory clarity by midyear.

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 07: U.S. President Donald Trump (C) speaks alongside Treasury Secretary Scott ... [+] Bessent (L) and White House Crypto Czar David Sacks at the The White House Digital Assets Summit at the White House on March 07, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Summit, which comes a day after Trump established a U.S. bitcoin reserve, will bring together industry experts and lawmakers for dialogs on market structure, regulations and cryptocurrency adoption. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

On his first day in office, Trump made a bold promise: Bitcoin will have regulatory clarity by midyear.

Soon after, a Jan. 23 executive order followed, directing the nation’s top policymakers—from the Treasury Secretary and SEC chair to the CFTC chair and Attorney General—to find a way to integrate digital assets into the traditional financial system.

Even ruling out edge cases like a full-fledged “national Bitcoin reserve,” Trump’s wishlist, detailed in the order, marks the most aggressive pro-crypto push in Bitcoin’s history. And there’s already progress.

Right after taking office, Trump’s appointed acting SEC chair, Mark Uyeda, revoked SAB 121—an accounting rule that forced banks to put crypto on their balance sheets, making custody impractical.

What actually comes out of Trump’s pro-crypto push is still unclear, but Wall Street looks eager to call it a done deal.

From financial advisor surveys and money flows to Wall Street’s recent investments, a mounting pile of data points to a major ideological shift about Bitcoin at an institutional level—one that goes beyond empty talk.

ETFs have proved there’s a lot of pent-up demand for Bitcoin

On Jan. 14, 2024, the SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs, giving institutional investors a backdoor into Bitcoin. These funds solved three key problems that had kept big money on the sidelines: compliance, tax inefficiencies, and custody.

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For the first time, institutions could buy Bitcoin as easily as the S&P 500. The result is nearly $113 billion in inflows in under a year—representing about 10% of Bitcoin’s total market cap.

Demand was so off the charts that Bitcoin ETFs broke records as the fastest-growing ETFs ever, outpacing every other asset class—including its ideological rival, gold.

In the first three trading days, Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $10 billion. For perspective, gold took nearly three years to hit that mark in the early 2000s. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas called it “insane.”

Since its launch, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust—the first spot Bitcoin ETF—has collected $53 billion in assets, making it the fastest ETF to hit the $50 billion mark.

“I wasn’t sure we’d ever see it, but I’ve never seen anything like it in my career—something going from 0 to $50 billion in basically six months,” BlackRock CFO Martin Small said earlier this month at the Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Conference.

Within their first year, Bitcoin ETFs have racked up more than $100 billion in assets. Considering that gold ETFs ended last month with $306 billion in assets, Bitcoin is already a third of the way toward matching gold in terms of ETF safe-haven demand.

And this isn’t just a retail-driven frenzy. According to SEC fillings, institutional ownership of Bitcoin ETFs tripled over the last quarter—from $12.4 billion to $38.7 billion. That’s in stark contrast to a 69% rise from retail investors, according to Fintel.

Ironically, “institutions are perhaps the only investors that remain excited about cryptocurrency right now,” Nick Murcin, founder of Crypto Bureau, told me. And there may be a good reason why.

Bitcoin’s narrative is shifting from speculative bet to portfolio diversifier

Not long ago, Wall Street slammed Bitcoin as the biggest fad in history. Warren Buffett famously called it “rat poison squared,” and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon dismissed it as “worse than tulip bulbs.”

But many fund managers who once wrote off Bitcoin have changed their tune. BlackRock and Fidelity have both issued Bitcoin ETFs. Goldman Sachs quietly bought up $1.6 billion worth of Bitcoin ETFs in 2014.

In April 2022, Fidelity became the first firm to let employees add Bitcoin to their 401(k) accounts. Last year, Morgan