Former President Donald Trump’s photograph is seen on a digital display outside of the venue ahead of his afternoon keynote speech on the final day of the Bitcoin 2024 conference at Music City Center July 27, 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee.
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A block away from the neon-lit buzz of Lower Broadway, where honky-tonk pours onto the city’s main drag at all hours, stands the Music City Center, a venue that’s hosted everything from craft beer conferences to a performance by the legendary Dolly Parton.
In late July, the complex filled up for something entirely different. It was the biggest bitcoin conference of the year, and the headline act was none other than former President Donald Trump.
For nearly 50 minutes on a Saturday afternoon in the country music capital, the Republican nominee for president extolled the virtues of bitcoin and spelled out what a second Trump administration would mean for the crypto industry to a packed crowd of conferencegoers who’d spent hours getting through the Secret Service’s tight security protocol.
“If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted and made in the USA,” Trump declared, in a message targeted to the industry’s bitcoin miners, who secure the network by running large banks of high-powered machines. “We will be creating so much electricity that you’ll be saying, ‘Please, please, President, we don’t want any more electricity. We can’t stand it!'”
The speech, which read like it was straight out of a bitcoiner’s bible, was quite the about-face for an ex-president who three years earlier had dismissed the cryptocurrency as a “scam.” Trump was, no doubt, lured by the potential of huge amounts of donor money from an industry that sees itself as under constant attack from the Biden-Harris administration and the heavy regulatory hand of SEC Chair Gary Gensler.
Trump told the audience in Nashville that he’d raised $25 million in crypto-related funds, a number that CNBC hasn’t been able to independently verify.
Turning Trump from a skeptic into a sudden bitcoin evangelist took the work, behind closed doors, of a small army of bitcoiners and other crypto advocates who were able to maneuver their way into the candidate’s inner circle. In particular, three friends in Puerto Rico came together to try and convince the Republican presidential hopeful of bitcoin’s value, and to eventually make that position loud and clear to a key audience in Nashville.
Donald Trump during his speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, TN.
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In bitcoin parlance, Trump was “orange-pilled.” It’s a play on the phrase “red pill” from the 1999 film, “The Matrix.” In the movie, the main character, Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), is given a choice of taking a red pill, which offers access to the unsettling truth about the world, or a blue pill, which signifies a false but far more comforting version of reality.
Orange pill refers to bitcoin’s official color and represents a person’s dedication to bitcoin over fiat currencies.
Within the matrix of confidantes, friends, family members, and colleagues united in their mission to orange-pill Trump were the trio of Puerto Rico residents: Amanda Fabiano, the shadow chief of bitcoin miners; Tracy Hoyos-López, a former California prosecutor; and David Bailey, CEO of media group BTC Inc. and organizer of the conference in Nashville.
Earlier this year, Bailey promised to turn out $100 million and 5 million votes for Trump. CNBC is told an update on fundraising numbers is coming soon.
Over Memorial Day weekend at a steak house called Bottles in the Guaynabo suburb of San Juan, the three began mapping out a plan as they shared family-style dishes.
Here’s how Fabiano recounted the initial exchange to CNBC.
“We were at dinner with a bunch of people, and David was like, ‘Hey, I’ve been talking to the administration, and I want to do a roundtable on mining, Can we chat this weekend?'” Fabiano said.
Bailey had spent months in dialogue with the Trump campaign, swapping bitcoin briefs and messages. He was about to make the 1,600-mile trek to meet the former president for the first time at Trump Tower in Manhattan, and was keen to deliver details of a potentially lucrative fundraiser and a miners working group featuring some of the top CEOs in the industry. It would serve as a prelude for what was to come in Nashville.
Hoyos-López, Bailey’s neighbor, had been recently orange-pilled, and was anxious to help out any way she could in getting Trump to Nashville. She happened to have a contact in the Trump orbit who was willing to make an introduction. Meanwhile, Fabiano’s history in bitcoin mining was important in giving the group street cred.
“Without Amanda, we wouldn’t have had the legitimacy to sell that this is a legitimate business,” Hoyos-López said. “She is the mining queen. She’s got all the miners.”
Hoyos-López added that many miners are former Wall Street executives.
“If you want to be taken seriously, you have to take serious people,” she said. “And it doesn’t get any more serious than miners.”
The Trump campaign didn’t respond to multiple inquiries about Trump’s latest crypto fundraising stats, his changed views on bitcoin and the events leading up to his appearance in Nashville.
Tracy Hoyos-López and Amanda Fabiano snapped a quick photo before smartphones were confiscated ahead of the crypto industry roundtable with Donald Trump in Music City Center in Nashville.
Tracy Hoyos-López
‘Who would we put in the room?’
Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies are created by miners around the world running high-powered computers that collectively validate transactions and simultaneously create new tokens. Their massive physical presence shows up in the form of sprawling data centers across the globe and offers a tangible image for newbies to understand an otherwise abstract technology.
Fabiano described it as a natural fit “when thinking about how to explain bitcoin to Trump in a way that makes sense.”
Bitcoin often gets a bad rap for the amount of energy it consumes, which is just shy of how much power Egypt uses annually. But as mining requires tremendous amounts of energy, the industry is developing innovative methods of producing and sharing it.
Miners can partner with utilities in a way that allows them to return energy to the grid when there’s excessive demand. They’re also utilizing untapped sources of renewable energy, often concentrated in remote parts of the country, helping to create an economy in areas that would otherwise be dormant. That could all lead to the U.S. becoming a greater producer of energy, which is of particular importance to satisfy the needs of the artificial intelligence boom.
Bailey confirmed that he flew to New York to meet with Trump, but he wouldn’t share specifics about what was said in the meeting. What’s clear is that, soon thereafter, Trump agreed to host about a dozen crypto executives and experts for a 90-minute roundtable in a small tea room at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
That meeting took place in mid-June, two weeks after the dinner at Bottles.
To get Trump on board with the big shindig in Nashville, Bailey, Fabiano and Hoyos-López knew they needed the right mix of people to clearly explain the virtues of mining and to convince the nominee that donations would be large enough to make the event worth his time.
“It was like, Who would we put in the room? Who would be the best people to explain this, right? Who would be willing to put dollars up, kind of put their skin in the game? And that was how it all got started,” Fabiano said.
Those who committed to going pitched in $500,000 apiece to a fundraising committee, according to multiple attendees.
Fabiano, who had never previously been involved in politics or campaigning, said the biggest concern among prospective attendees was the fear of appearing partisan. She said ahead of the meeting there was “a prep call for agenda items.”
Fabiano put together a presentation for the Trump team with background material on the miners who would be at the Mar-a-Lago roundtable to show that, “We are real people, and we are real businesses, and you should take us seriously.”
With thunderstorms bearing down on the Atlantic coast, the Mar-a-Lago attendees, including representatives from Riot Platforms, Marathon Digital Holdings, Terawulf and Core Scientific, forfeited their smartphones to a Radio Frequency Identification pouch that blocked incoming and outgoing signals. From under a large chandelier, they listened to the former president engage on the nuances of America’s energy deficit, bitcoin mining, AI and competition with China.
“That roundtable really set off like, OK, this industry is real, and they’re showing up with dollars, and they’re showing up with like, actual smart things to say and agenda items that are important to America,” said Fabiano.
After years of facing political backlash, Fabiano said she was glad Trump took an active interest in “digging in and learning about why this industry is real” and “why we’re not a bunch of criminals.”
Fabiano and crew knew they weren’t starting from scratch with Trump.
Bailey started talks with the Trump camp in March.In April, Trump launched his latest nonfungible token collection on the Solana blockchain. In May, he became the first major presidential nominee to accept cryptocurrency donations. He’d started talking on the campaign trail about defending so-called self-custody of coins and vowed at the Libertarian National Convention in May to keep Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and “her goons” away from bitcoin holders.
In early June in San Francisco, technologists, crypto executives and venture capitalists paid up to $300,000 per ticket to join a Trump fundraiser that ultimately raised more than $12 million. The more Trump raised, the more he leaned into his newfound support.
BTC Inc. CEO David Bailey and industry liaison for the Bitcoin Advocacy Project, Tracy Hoyos-López, in the Bitcoin 2024 “war room” ahead of the industry roundtable with Donald Trump.
Tracy Hoyos-López
“There are a lot of people in Trump’s orbit that are fans of bitcoin,” said Bailey. “There are members of his family that are fans of bitcoin. Donald Trump has sold real estate for bitcoin. I just bought a pair of sneakers from him in bitcoin.”
Bailey said Trump’s journey from cynic to fan is relatable. He said Michael Saylor, the billionaire founder of MicroStrategy, was once a skeptic and that he’s been on a personal journey himself for 12 years.
“There is no necessarily single person who’s responsible for orange-pilling him,” Bailey said, of Trump. “I think in terms of him having a 180 on this topic, that is really a very natural thing.”
After months of dialogue with Trump and his aides, Bailey said he thinks the former president’s attraction to bitcoin is that it “represents a transformational opportunity for the country.”
“In that sense, I think it’s kind of a match made in heaven,” he said.
Getting to ‘yes’
Hoyos-López said the period between the Mar-a-Lago meeting in June and the Nashville conference late last month was “agonizing,” as the group waited for an answer.
The first “yes” from the Trump camp was to the meeting in Manhattan, and the news was delivered by phone to Hoyos-López while Bailey was in Japan. The conference was more than a month out. Hoyos-López said she jumped in her car and drove to Bailey’s house so she and his wife, Emily, could prepare the one suit he had in his closet.
“We couldn’t find any dry cleaners that would have this in time in Puerto Rico,” Hoyos-López said. “We ended up having to get super creative, like putting his suit in the dryer, putting his suit in the sun, steaming it.”
There was a lot of work to be done in a little amount of time.
Soon after the Mar-a-Lago roundtable, Trump said yes to Nashville.
“I’m a criminal attorney, I was a prosecutor, so I’m used to dealing with very big and very emotional moments, but not treating them as such,” Hoyos-López said. “While everyone is excited and celebrating, I’m like, ‘Alright, well, we need to sit down and figure out.'”
Three months earlier, Bailey’s wildest dream was to get Trump to Nashville. He talked about it often with his core group of friends in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory with crypto-friendly policies, including huge tax breaks to those who spend at least 183 days on the island each year.
“Never in a million years, did we think we were going to be here,” Hoyos-López said. “Getting a presidential candidate to the Bitcoin Conference was definitely one of the coolest things that I probably will ever do in my life.”
At the conference, Hoyos-López, Fabiano, and Bailey worked to stage a second roundtable with Trump. They brought in a wider set of industry participants, including the Winklevoss twins, Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal and Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick. Kid Rock, Billy Ray Cyrus and some top mining executives were also there, along with a smattering of politicians.
Attorney and bitcoiner Tracy Hoyos-López sat down with Donald Trump as part of an industry working group.
Tracy Hoyos-López
Trump, in his keynote, donned a blue-and-white-striped tie and an American flag pinned to the lapel of his navy blue suit. He declared that a Trump White House would “keep 100% of all the bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires into the future,” and said he would fire SEC Chair Gensler.
To Fabiano, Bailey, and Hoyos-López, the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher, as Democratic nominee Kamala Harris gains momentum in the polls.
“Our industry as a whole will cease to exist if Trump doesn’t win,” Hoyos-López said. “There are some rumors out there that Harris is trying to change her stance on crypto as a whole, and to appear more friendly, but I just don’t believe anything that they say.”
Hoyos-López said she’s now focused on getting out votes and rallying bitcoiners who she says are “single-issue voters.”
“Yes, the money that you get in is very important,” she said. “But what really matters at the end of the day is votes.”
Less than a week after leaving Nashville, Fabiano, Hoyos-López, and Bailey were back together closer to home to process all that had happened. They met at a restaurant called Santaella and shared a mix of Puerto Rican tapas, including a personal favorite — goat cheese quesadilla with nuts and honey on top.
“We just sat down and had a conversation about like, ‘Holy crap. We did this,'” Hoyos-Lopez said. “We created the table, and we brought everyone to the table, which is literally what this community is all about.”
California’s rollercoaster of an electric bicycle voucher program, designed to make the highly effective transportation alternative affordable for more California residents, has hit yet another bumpy section of track. This time, a “technical issue” is being blamed for the second tranche of vouchers being delayed indefinitely, causing yet another headache for the beleaguered California E-Bike Incentive Program.
The program was set to launch its second round last night, opening its application window for one hour to distribute 1,000 more vouchers worth up to $2,000 off of an electric bicycle.
But program’s operators announced just before the application window was set to close yesterday that the website had experienced technical problems.
Unlike the first round of the incentive program, last night’s application window was designed to last for an hour, giving every eligible California resident who entered the website during the window an equal chance at receiving a voucher. That system was designed as an improvement to the first round, which was widely criticized for its “first come, first served” approach that rewarded fast typing and clicking to exhaust the first 1,500 vouchers in mere seconds.
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However, the timing of the announcement last night meant that many hopeful applicants were left waiting on the website for an hour before learning that the application round was being delayed indefinitely.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a spokesperson for the California Air Resources Board, which administers the program, said the board is investigating the issues and attempted to troubleshoot the problems “in real time.” The program “ultimately made the decision to reschedule once it became clear that not everyone was able to access the waiting room,” said CARB’s Lindsay Buckley.
It is unclear how many people entered the website during the one-hour application window, but the first round of applications launched last December saw over 100,000 people vying for the limited number of vouchers.
Despite occasional issues like these, such e-bike voucher programs are a powerful motivator for cities and states aiming to shift more trips away from cars and toward sustainable transportation. By directly reducing the upfront cost of an electric bike – often thousands of dollars – these incentives make e-bikes accessible to a broader population, especially lower-income riders who may not be able to afford one otherwise. And unlike subsidies for electric cars, which tend to benefit wealthier households, e-bike voucher programs often deliver a much higher return on investment in terms of mode shift, equity, and emissions reductions.
The benefits don’t stop at access. These programs help normalize e-bike use in urban and suburban areas, accelerating cultural adoption and proving that two wheels can be a practical alternative to four. Cities that have rolled out vouchers, like Denver and San Diego, have seen immediate surges in ridership and have reported that many recipients use their e-bikes as replacements for car trips.
As policymakers look to reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality, and hit climate targets, e-bike vouchers offer a fast, scalable, and cost-effective tool that delivers results where it matters most: in people’s daily lives. Despite California’s own voucher program repeatedly hitting roadblocks, these types of programs have proven invaluable to making real changes in the accessibility of important commuting alternatives to cars.
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The first 2022 GMC HUMMER EV Pickup Edition 1 rolls off the assembly line at Factory ZERO (Source: GM)
Donald Trump signed two executive orders today that walked back parts of tariffs he previously imposed on US automakers ahead of a rally in Michigan to mark his first 100 days in office.
The Wall Street Journal first reported today in an exclusive that Trump was “expected to soften the impact of his automotive tariffs, preventing duties on foreign-made cars from stacking on top of other tariffs and easing some levies on car parts.”
Trump signed an executive order making sure the 25% tariffs on vehicles and certain auto parts won’t stack on top of existing aluminum, steel, or Canada and Mexico tariffs. He also gave automakers a credit to help blunt the impact of the 25% duties on imported parts that go into US-built cars.
Trump’s backpedal comes after weeks of meeting with automaker executives, and a week after a coalition that included GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Hyundai sent a letter urging him to drop tariffs on foreign auto parts due to land in May.
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American Automotive Policy Council (AAPC) president Matt Blunt today said in response to the executive orders, “American Automakers Ford, GM, and Stellantis appreciate the administration’s clarification that tariffs will not be layered on top of the existing Section 232 tariffs on autos and auto parts. Applying multiple tariffs to the same product or part was a significant concern for American automakers, and we are glad to see this addressed. We will review the details of the executive order closely to assess how effectively it will mitigate the impact of tariffs on American automakers, our domestic supply chains and ultimately American consumers.” The AAPC represents Ford, GM, and Stellantis.
Electrek’s Take
The 25% auto tariffs implemented under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act aren’t going anywhere, and most economists say that tariffs will raise car prices and slow auto sales. This White House Fact Sheet is titled, “President Donald J. Trump Incentivizes Domestic Automobile Production.” Where’s the incentive? US automakers are just getting hit with the stick once instead of twice, and they’re thanking Trump for it.
The carrot that worked as an incentive was Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, along with the stability that came with it. All this whiplash is terrible for the US and global economy.
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New data suggests that the Tesla Powerwall 3 is significantly disrupting the US solar inverter market.
The home battery pack’s integrated inverter is changing the game.
Tesla acquired its solar business when it bought SolarCity in a controversial deal due to Musk being a large shareholder of both Tesla and SolarCity, and Musk’s cousin led the latter.
The automaker kept the SolarCity operations going for a few years. In fact, it continued until after Tesla shareholders sued Musk over the acquisition, and Musk defended himself by claiming that SolarCity had become an integral part of Tesla.
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Shortly after he won the lawsuit, Tesla virtually stopped all operations that came from its SolarCity acquisition, which primarily consisted of residential solar financing and installations.
Tesla even stopped reporting solar deployment. The company’s energy business now consists almost entirely of Powerwall and Megapack deployments.
However, the launch of the Powerwall 3 has indirectly brought Tesla back into the solar business, as the home battery pack features an inverter that works for both solar and storage applications.
EnergySage is a company that matches solar installers with potential buyers, and as a result, it has a wealth of interesting data about the solar industry in the US. Today, it released its Spring 2025 Marketplace report.
In the report, EnergySage revealed that Tesla became the second-most quoted inverter brand in the second half of last year:
Tesla became the most quoted battery brand in H2 2024, occupying 63% of Marketplace share nationwide. Because the Powerwall 3 includes an integrated inverter, Tesla also became the second-most quoted inverter brand. With batteries increasingly being added to solar systems—the national battery attachment rate jumped to 45% in H2 2024, an all-time high—Tesla’s growth was a key driver of the low storage and solar prices seen on EnergySage. In 2025, we are examining whether brand backlash and equipment shortages will affect Tesla’s Marketplace share.
This is also a byproduct of the increased popularity of energy storage systems when deploying new solar systems.
In big solar markets like California and Texas, the majority of residential solar quotes are attached to batteries, and Tesla is not the top quoted brand, thanks to Powerwall 3:
Powerwall was already the preferred home battery pack for many homeowners, and the fact that it now includes a solar inverter has made it even more attractive, as most home energy storage systems in the US are being deployed along with rooftop solar.
The Powerwall 3’s solar inverter integration is pushing solar plus storage costs down quite a bit.
The popularity of the Powerwall 3 has particularly hurt Enphase, a leader in solar inverter. It had 73% of the US market in 2022, and now it is down to 53%.
Despite Tesla driving prices down, Powerwall 3 is not the cheapest battery pack available. Panasonic and EG4 batteries were both priced lower on a per kWh basis than Tesla’s in the second half of 2024, but Tesla won on cost when also replacing the solar inverter.
If you’re interested in installing solar panels and/or batteries for your home, we recommend using EnergySage. You will be able to get quotes without any hassle and only talk to someone when you are ready to move forward. Within minutes, you can get on the path to producing your own power with solar and battery storage, including with Powerwall.
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