In 2019, President Donald Trump asserted that cryptocurrency was 'highly volatile and based on thin air.' The description is still highly accurate'but Trump seems to no longer believe it. These days, he praises the crypto community as brimming with 'the kind of spirit that built our country and is exciting to watch.' What happened between Trump's first and second terms is fairly predictable. Crypto advocates flattered him, and then he and his family personally invested in various crypto-related ventures. Just before his inauguration in 2025, he launched a $TRUMP meme coin, which reportedly has made his family and their partners a lot of money. Trump's oldest sons recently invested in a bitcoin-mining operation. And they hold majority stakes in World Liberty Financial, making them major dealers in the crypto world. That might help explain why the president has declared that he wants the United States to be the 'crypto capital of the world.' What's less predictable is how the president's change of opinion could destabilize the American financial system. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with the Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey, who covers the economy and politics, about Trump's plans to integrate crypto into the government and mainstream banking. What happens when Trump weakens regulation on a notoriously unstable currency' Who benefits' Who is likely to get duped' And when the crypto-induced financial crisis comes, how will it surprise us'...

Since President Donald Trump took office, US authorities have increasingly abdicated responsibility for policing crypto-related offenses. Attorneys and lawmakers fear the resulting enforcement vacuum could be used to violate rules with impunity. While running for office, Trump repeatedly declared himself a champion of bitcoin, and members of his family have become thoroughly entangled with the crypto industry. Over the past few months, his administration has set about unravelling Biden-era crypto enforcement policies thread-by-thread, defanging the civil enforcement division that previously targeted the crypto industry and pardoning crypto executives who had pleaded guilty under the previous regime. Now, the Department of Justice is retreating from crypto enforcement as well. On Monday evening, in a letter addressed to all DOJ employees, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche announced that the agency would deprioritize certain criminal prosecutions against crypto businesses, including failures to prevent money laundering and obtain money transmission licenses. As part of the change, the DOJ will disband its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), a unit that specializes in investigating crypto-related criminality....

Obviously too young to get a bank account, Ruskin did freelance development work he found on reddit in exchange for bitcoin. There he saw that Coinbase was hiring, and boldly sent the head of operations a cold email asking if he could work for the crypto exchange. 'Long story short, I ended up writing much of the early software that powered the Coinbase platform,' he tells TechCrunch. 'I didn't write the v0 codebase'but I did write a lot of software that brought us from 1 to 10.' After four years at Coinbase, Ruskin decided to go to college and then to law school. He started a few startups along the way, including an election security company where he drafted and won a patent on its technology. Ruskin, now 26, says Inventex wants to ease the process of preparing and filing patent applications by using a series of AI agents augmented by licensed attorneys. He believes that Inventex can help companies get patent-pending '10x faster' ' in days, rather than months that a traditional firm might take....

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) may have to pay a fine of $1 billion or more to resolve a U.S. export control investigation related to a chip it made that was used in a Huawei AI processor, according to a report by Reuters. It's the latest development in a situation that first came to light in late 2024 involving TSMC, Huawei, and Xiamen Sophgo Technologies, a Chinese chip designer. Sophgo is an affiliate of Bitmain, a Bitcoin mining equipment supplier, and TSMC is the world's biggest contract chipmaker. This is important not just because of export rules but because Huawei's multi-chip processor is considered the most advanced in its class to be made in China. It's estimated that hundreds of thousands of these processors were produced with these components. 'TSMC is a law-abiding company and we are committed to complying with all applicable rules and regulations, including applicable export controls,' TSMC said in a statement. 'In compliance with the regulatory requirements, TSMC has not supplied to Huawei since mid-September 2020. If we have any reason to believe there are potential issues, we will take prompt action to ensure compliance, including conducting investigations and proactively communicating with relevant parties, including customers and regulatory authorities, as necessary. We proactively communicated with the U.S. Commerce Department regarding the matter in the report and continue to support.'...