President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly planning to use his executive authority to support cryptocurrency companies and promote broader digital asset adoption during the early days of his administration, according to Reuters. This initiative marks a sharp departure from the regulatory approach under President Joe Biden’s administration, which took stringent measures to address fraud and money laundering in the crypto sector.

Executive Orders to Signal Crypto Support

Trump is expected to issue an executive order establishing a cryptocurrency advisory council, a proposal he initially suggested in July, as reported by Reuters. Two sources familiar with the discussions noted that this council could include up to 20 members tasked with advising the government on creating crypto-friendly policies. Bloomberg News was the first to report the plan to establish such a council.

Additionally, Trump’s team has reportedly discussed reversing specific regulatory measures that have posed challenges for crypto companies. According to Reuters, one potential target is the 2022 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accounting guidance known as “SAB 121,” which has been criticized for increasing costs for companies, particularly banks, attempting to hold cryptocurrencies for third parties. This action could alleviate financial burdens and facilitate greater participation in the crypto market.

Related: FTC Raises Antitrust Concerns Over Big Tech’s AI Partnerships

Controversial “Operation Choke Point 2.0” in Focus

Another area of focus for the incoming administration is addressing concerns raised by cryptocurrency executives about “Operation Choke Point 2.0.” This term, used by industry insiders, describes what they perceive as a coordinated effort by bank regulators to restrict crypto companies’ access to traditional financial services. While bank regulators have denied the existence of such an initiative, sources cited by Reuters suggest that Trump plans to issue an executive order to halt these practices.

Broader Implications for the Crypto Sector

If implemented, these policy changes could significantly impact the cryptocurrency industry by fostering a more supportive regulatory environment. Experts in both the regulatory and crypto spaces told Reuters that such actions might accelerate the mainstream adoption of digital assets, signaling a new era for the sector under the Trump administration.

This approach stands in stark contrast to the policies of the Biden administration, which pursued legal action against major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, in efforts to combat illicit activities and safeguard consumers.

Source: Reuters

More than 560 million people worldwide currently own crypto assets, and new and seasoned investors alike are constantly looking for promising new projects to buy into.

New projects can usually be purchased at lower prices, when compared to established coins, and often have the potential to sky-rocket in value. Because of the potential gains to be had, investors are constantly on the lookout for possible investments. 

Let’s explore the upcoming crypto that investors should think about buying before prices go up. 

Upcoming Crypto With Potential

Investors often do their own research to find the best new projects to buy into. Research usually includes listening to the news, reading crypto blogs, and following sites like Coinbase closely. Coinbase provides a crucial gateway to adopt new cryptocurrencies. The “Coinbase Effect” describes new tokens listed that often experience significant price surges of 20-50%. It’s the ideal source of investment opportunities for short-term investors. Because of this, investors often review upcoming Coinbase exchange listings to find promising new coins. Crypto writer Michael Graw explains that Coinbase is known for its strict vetting process. This means that the coins listed on Coinbase have already been reviewed by experts, which many investors appreciate. Between checking sites like Coinbase, keeping up with the news, and reading crypto articles online, investors can stay up to date with potential coins to invest in. Here are a few of the top choices: 

Ethereum: The Smart Contract Powerhouse

Ethereum dominates the decentralised application (dApp) realm, particularly with the Ethereum 2.0 rollout that enhances energy efficiency and scalability. Ethereum currently trades at around £5,000, providing a top choice for retail and institutional investors. The smart contract giant provides opportunities for long-term investments. 

Analysts project that Ethereum could double its value over the next 1.5 years because the network demand continues to grow. The blockchain’s ecosystem hosts decentralised exchanges, DeFi platforms, and NFTs, engraving Ethereum’s status in the blockchain space as a critical infrastructure with smart contracts for data privacy and security. 

Bitcoin: The Dominant Crypto Force

Bitcoin is the foundation of the cryptocurrency market, capitalising the industry at a market value of £1.5 trillion and currently trading around the £76,000 marker in early December. Bitcoin’s inflation hedge capabilities and reliable long-term value stores make it indispensable in an investor’s diversified portfolio. 

Tim Draper, a trusted venture capitalist, predicts Bitcoin to hit $250,000 or £198,000 by the end of 2025, indicating the potential for a 150% growth rate on the cryptocurrency’s market. Increasingly supportive government policies and adoption will drive Draper’s predictions. For example, there is a proposed Bitcoin reserve for the US market. 

High-Potential Altcoins

Solana: Exceptional Scalability and Speed

Solana is known as the Ethereum killer because it provides faster transaction speeds, reaching 65,000 transactions a second. It also charges minimal fees and has an ecosystem valued at over £25 billion. Solana is fast becoming a good choice for NFTs and DeFi applications. Additionally, analysts forecast the potential for 80-120% returns by mid-2025. 

Wall Street Pepe: Trading and Staking 

Wall Street Pepe ($WEPE) is showing great promise in the crypto scene. This coin ticks all of the usual boxes but also allows investors to showcase their best trades each week to win prizes. Additionally, investors can stake their Wall Street Pepe in order to earn more from what they already have, which is a win-win. 

Polkadot and Polygon: Specialists in Scalability

Polygon enables faster and more affordable transactions by addressing scalability issues in Ethereum, providing layer-2 solutions. The current market cap valuation is around £10 billion but projections show possible doubling by the end of 2025. Polkadot uses a unique parachain technology that allows interoperability between blockchains, and the price prediction indicates the potential for a 383% return on investment (ROI) by the end of 2025.

XRP: Riding the Legal Victory Wave

The Ripple Network’s native token XRP shows promise with a fragmented victory against the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). XRP has surged 120% since mid-2024, currently trading at around £1. Ripple’s partnerships with major giants like Standard Chartered and Santander have analysts believing it may double in value by the end of 2025. 

Chainlink: Bridging Real-World Data With Blockchain Technology

Chainlink plays a pivotal role in the decentralised oracle industry, currently trading at around £7.20 and having an impressive early market cap of £3.7 billion. The technology innovates how real-world data and smart contracts interact, making it an integral tool for DeFi and enterprise solutions. Chainlink also integrates well with Solana and Ethereum and predictions show the potential for an 85% price surge by the end of 2025. 

The Impact of Institutional Interest

The cryptocurrency investment landscape relies heavily on institutional interest. For example, spot Bitcoin ETF introductions captivated billions in capital while funds like the iShares Bitcoin Trust accumulated more than £30 billion in months. 

Still, institutional investors use diversified portfolios with utility-driven digital assets like Chainlink to secure smart contracts. Avalanche, another fast blockchain, is also gaining traction in DeFi, with both Altcoins positioned to exceed 100% returns by the end of 2025.

The Role of Regulation

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) allows UK investors to benefit from a more secure and transparent cryptocurrency investment domain. The FCA implemented measures to regulate cryptocurrency advertisements to guarantee clear guidelines for retail investors. 

The widespread adoption and regulatory improvements are expected to entice more attention from institutional investors to ensure sustainable growth while the regulatory guidelines protect everyday investors seeking long-term but steady investment prospects. 

Retail Diversification and Sentiment

The retail investor environment drives market trends harder than most institutions, especially with sentiment-driven initiatives using consumer-centric tokens. Some new Coinbase listings show promise for short-term volatility with possible price surges in 2025. 

However, retail investors prefer the active ecosystems, innovative decentralisation, and robust fundamentals of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and some older Altcoins. If investors could learn anything from the retail sector, it would be to diversify their portfolio with high-return crypto. 

Diversify investment portfolios with well-known and stable cryptocurrencies like Ethereum or Bitcoin while adding some high-potential Altcoins like Cardano, Polygon, and Solana to balance the risk and reward as retail investors do.

Donald Trump never misses a good brand opportunity. You can buy collectible Trump trading cards, limited-edition autographed Trump guitars, $499 “Trump Won” low-top sneakers, and Trump-endorsed Bibles. Long before he got into politics, Trump peddled liquor (Trump Vodka), education (Trump University), and meat (Trump Steaks). But Trump’s latest enterprise—a new cryptocurrency token named $TRUMP—might be his most brazen yet.

After his team launched the token on Friday evening, the price per coin shot from $6 to more than $70 within about a day. Because two of Trump’s affiliate companies own 80 percent of the total supply of the coin, Trump essentially manifested more than $10 billion in a single weekend. At one point this weekend, Axios estimated that $TRUMP momentarily accounted for about 89 percent of Trump’s net worth, making him one of the richest people in the world. And last night, Melania Trump announced her own coin, $MELANIA.

Throughout Trump’s long history of cashing in on his personal brand, there has never been such a dramatic injection of artificial value. Both $TRUMP and $MELANIA are so-called memecoins. There are no business fundamentals under the hood, no practical use cases to speak of. Memecoins are typically spun up in a matter of minutes, whisked to massively overinflated valuations on social media, and promptly dumped on the suckers who bought in a few moments too late. It’s an incredibly efficient, incredibly predictable, and incredibly predatory playbook.

The arc of a memecoin’s market cycle almost always bends toward zero: A coin inspired by the “Hawk Tuah” girl was worth $500 million just after it launched late last year and swiftly lost 99 percent of its value. Other silly tokens, such as the inauspiciously named $BODEN (an unofficial, unsanctioned riff on President Joe Biden’s lame-duck era) have experienced similar collapses. It’s the same story in each case: Insiders and early adopters turn a quick profit at the expense of latecomers. And although it’s definitely possible that Trump’s position of global influence gives $TRUMP more staying power than the typical memecoin, it’s arguably even more volatile than cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, that are not exactly stable in their own right. The value of $TRUMP has already dipped by more than half and is now worth less than $8 billion.

In a sense, the $TRUMP token represents a natural move for the president. He has made an enormous effort to position himself as a powerful ally of the crypto industry: Trump has said he plans to create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” and promoted another crypto business with his three sons just weeks before the election. Trump announced the coin on Truth Social on Friday night at the same time as the pre-inauguration “Crypto Ball,” a ritzy celebration emceed by David Sacks, a tech entrepreneur and podcast host whom Trump has tapped as his crypto czar. It was meant as a kind of debutante ceremony: After four years of what the industry has interpreted as targeted sanctions and harassment from SEC Chair Gary Gensler and other steely regulators, crypto is finally free to become the fullest version of itself.

Whether memecoins are even legal is a matter of dispute. Biden’s SEC regularly went after crypto companies for issuing coins that appeared to violate existing securities laws. But Trump himself is picking the next SEC chair. There’s also the question of what Trump’s new tens of billions of dollars on paper end up amounting to in the real world, because most of the total token supply hasn’t actually been issued, and because any attempt to start cashing out would no doubt tank the price. Still, even after Trump has promised a new golden age for crypto during his second administration, his new hypothetical billions practically cement his interest in a more hands-off approach to the industry. Keep in mind: Trump called bitcoin a “scam” just a few years ago, when crypto didn’t seem to suit his interests. Trump is far less likely to level those kinds of judgments in the future.

Another potential issue is that because memecoins are so lightly regulated, anyone can buy them, whether they are 12-year-olds with a parent’s credit card or North Korean hackers looking for leverage over the global economy. Some of the available supply of Trump’s official cryptocurrency might already be controlled by foreign interests. There’s also the chance that Trump’s memecoin gambit could inspire other world political and cultural leaders to release similar coins. (Lorenzo Sewell, the pastor who administered today’s inaugural prayer, has already announced a $LORENZO coin.) If foreign actors get their hands on Trump’s supposedly America-first economic initiatives, the administration’s promise to turn the country into a “bitcoin superpower” starts to feel a little hollower.

Although much of the crypto world has been eagerly awaiting Trump’s return to the White House, a new sense of unease has settled over some of the industry’s biggest defenders, who recognize that memecoins don’t exactly reflect well on crypto. Memecoins are “zero-sum,” the investor Balaji Srinivasan, typically aligned with Trump, reminded his followers on X over the weekend. “There is no wealth creation … And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.” Nic Carter, a prominent crypto investor and Trump supporter, reasons that the unease is indicative of a broader panic, a slow-growing sense that Trump can’t be controlled in the way the industry might want. $TRUMP “exposed the worst parts of the crypto industry to the public eye in a way that really didn’t need to happen, right when we were on the cusp of legitimacy,” he told me today.

A Trump Steak might not be the juiciest cut you’ve ever eaten, but at least it’s a piece of real meat—something you can see and touch. $TRUMP enthusiasts won’t even get that much.