3 of Trump’s 11 Fed Chair Contenders Favor Cryptocurrency
President Trump has shortlisted 11 candidates to succeed Jerome Powell as Fed Chair in May 2025, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent set to begin interviews after Labor Day. Among them, three are notably cryptocurrency-friendly: Jefferies strategist David Zervos—whose firm backed platforms like eToro, Circle and Bullish—and BlackRock CIO Rick Rieder, who sees bitcoin as a key asset allocation tool, alongside Fed Governors Michelle Bowman and Chris Waller, who have urged staff to hold small crypto stakes to understand the technology and acknowledged crypto payments as valid innovations. Powell remains cautious, likening bitcoin to ‘digital gold’. With the Fed Chair controlling U.S. interest rates and liquidity, traders should watch these candidates’ monetary policy and cryptocurrency views closely, as market expectations for rate cuts could drive risk-asset flows, including into digital currencies like bitcoin.
Bullish
The emergence of at least three cryptocurrency-friendly Fed Chair contenders—Jefferies strategist David Zervos, BlackRock CIO Rick Rieder and Governors Michelle Bowman and Chris Waller—signals potential for a more accommodative stance towards digital assets at the Federal Reserve. With markets pricing in U.S. interest rate cuts, a chair sympathetic to cryptocurrency could boost liquidity and direct risk-asset flows into bitcoin and other digital tokens. While Jerome Powell remains cautious, a successor embracing blockchain innovation and small-scale crypto adoption among staff may lower regulatory uncertainty, improve institutional backing and drive upward momentum in crypto markets, making the outlook bullish.