The last week, most of the major cryptocurrencies have fallen sharply. Bitcoin is +1.5% the last 7 days, but other major altcoins such as Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin and EOS have all sold off. On Thursday evening around 7:00PM CST , President Donald Trump shared his thoughts on social media regarding Cryptocurrency and Facebook Libra Project. Trump tweeted that “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” Trump then continued to rant about Facebook Libra and how they will have to be regulated like all other banks if they want to proceed. You can see both tweets below.
Where is This All Coming From?
With the way POTUS positioned the tweets, it sounds like he was receiving a lot of heat on the topic. With recent developments such as G20 summit in Japan, it seems like many cryptocurrency / blockchain enthusiasts thought a huge announcement was going to be made. Trump could also be responding to all the press coverage on Judy Shelton. Recently POTUS chose Judy Shelton to join the Board of the Federal Reserve. Judy is an economist and economic advisor to President Trump. She has been linked to favoring the “gold standard” and “virtual currencies.” With all the media coverage on Judy Shelton, the tweets tonight could very well be in response to Judy in order to share where he stands regardless of what she has an interest in.
White House Cryptocurrency Developments in 2018
The feedback from Trump tonight was very interesting based on developments that were reported by Forbes last year. According to Forbes back in October 2018, “Ripple Labs executive suggesting the U.S. administration is interested in ripple (XRP) adoption to offset China’s bitcoin strength.” It was reported that the White House was worried about the power China had over Bitcoin mining. It was quite interesting to see the Trump tweets tonight which seemed completely opposite of this development last year. Despite Trump sounding bearish on the whole cryptocurrency industry, he did mention “unregulated” crypto assets. If we take a look at this development above from last year, you could argue that XRP would not fall under the category of “Unregulated” since Ripple is the corporation behind the project.
Photo Cred To Simon Edelman, Energy Department Via Flickr
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