People walk past an advertisement feature Donald Trump with Bitcoin in Hong Kong.
May James | Lightrocket | Getty Images
As President Donald Trump hit the 100-day mark this week for his second term in office, his approval numbers were lower than for any administration at this point in over seven decades.
Don’t tell that to the crypto community.
Trump ran for office on a promise to make America “the crypto capital of the world.” Those who got behind that message say he’s already delivered, or at least gotten off to a hot start.
A blitz of executive actions, strategic appointments, and early wins, from the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to the rollback of enforcement-heavy SEC tactics, has left the industry feeling more welcome in Washington, D.C., than ever.
“Every single appointment — I’m happy with from a crypto perspective,” said Nic Carter, founding partner at Castle Island Ventures. “The previous financial regulatory apparatus was dead set against crypto, and now it’s been a total 180 compared to that.”
President Trump faced early blowback after proposing the possibility of a strategic crypto reserve that would go beyond bitcoin and include other digital currencies like ether, XRP, Solana’sSOL token and Cardano’s ADA. Skeptics said taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be spent on such risky assets. The president soon narrowed the plan to focus solely on bitcoin and made clear he wouldn’t use taxpayer funds to support a government buying strategy.
He’s also been criticized by some for launching a meme coin that’s added billions of dollars in paper wealth to his net worth. The $TRUMP token surged earlier this month after its website announced that top holders would be invited to a private dinner with the president. His family is also involved in other crypto projects.
“It doesn’t really help to have members of his family do encrypted projects of their own,” Carter said. “I understand that they are interested in the industry and want to engage with it, but the optics are not that favorable around that.”
But for the most part, that behavior is being ignored as the crypto industry prefers to focus its attention elsewhere even as the president’s job approval broadly sits at just 43%, according to an average of recent national polls.
At the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Jonathan Gould has signaled support for issuing new bank charters to crypto firms. During President Joe Biden’s presidency, that was almost unthinkable.
“We’ll see a lot of new crypto firms getting bank charters,” Carter said. “And new banks getting set up that are expressively focused on crypto and stablecoins.”
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, under interim chair Travis Hill, is also making moves. Crypto fans have applauded his efforts to expose what industry insiders call “Choke Point 2.0,” an alleged coordinated effort by regulators during the Biden presidency to pressure banks into severing ties with crypto.
Paul Atkins, the new chair of the SEC, represents a stark contrast to predecessor Gary Gensler, who was a notorious hardliner when it came to crypto regulations and enforcement. Carter said the SEC under Atkins has already begun working directly with crypto stakeholders, including Castle Island, to craft guidance on token issuance and the line between securities and commodities.
“This is the clarity we’ve been asking for,” Carter said. “Even barring a legislative solution, I think the SEC is going to come out with real guidance around tokens and how a domestic crypto firm can operate.”
Atkins made his first public appearance just four days into the job by opening a crypto roundtable — a move that sent a clear signal to industry participants. Last week, Atkins hosted a half-day session at SEC headquarters in Washington, D.C., focused on crypto innovation and custody. The event took place weeks after the regulator formally dropped its long-running lawsuit against Ripple, a symbolic end to a four-year battle between the SEC and the crypto industry.
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Veronica McGregor, the chief legal officer of Exodus and aparticipant in the SEC’s crypto roundtable,echoed Carter’s sentiment in calling the approach a “180 pivot.”
“Just having the roundtables are kind of surprising and refreshing,” said McGregor, who contributed to the political advocacy group Stand With Crypto during the 2024 campaign. “Given that we have an administration that is touting itself as pro-crypto and making some changes that need to be made, I would say those donations were strategically placed and are paying off.”
Waiting on the Fed
Trump has tapped Brian Quintenz, currently policy chief for the crypto group at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Carter cautioned that the Federal Reserve remains a “structural holdout.” While banks can now custody crypto, thanks to the repeal of an accounting rule called SAB 121, they still can’t work directly with crypto firms “unless the Fed says they can,” Carter said.
The FDIC and OCC have rescinded their anti-crypto guidance, but the Federal Reserve has only partially followed suit. A notice from Jan. 2023 continues to restrict banks from certain crypto-related activities.
“The Fed is still the blocker for banks to deal with stablecoins for crypto,” Carter said.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Still, the industry has largely gotten what it wants.
“It wasn’t all that long ago that we had an administration that not only was skeptical of this entirely new technology, but was in fact hostile to it,” Grewal said.“Now we have a White House and a wider administration that is not only welcoming of digital assets and blockchain-based technologies, but embracing it in a number of different ways, and that really has stood out in the first 100 days.”
Grewal also pointed to some bipartisan momentum in Congress, including bills on stablecoins and market structure.
“We’ve got one issue, it seems, where the White House, together with Republicans on the Hill, have worked together with Democrats in both houses of the Congress to get digital asset legislation on the move,” Grewal said.
Grewal praised the SEC for soliciting public input and opening the door to industry participation on topics like custody and market structure.
Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase’s chief policy officer, said the administration has already met two core expectations: ending the regulatory crackdown on crypto and working with Congress to deliver clarity.
He said he’s been pleasantly surprised by the scope of the administration’s ambitions to go beyond bitcoin and to integrate blockchain technology across the broader financial system.
“They are moving much more aggressively to try to implement crypto and blockchain technology in the broader capital markets,” he said. At the SEC, he said, that includes tokenizing the equities market and examining how that fits within traditional regulatory frameworks.
Shirzad also noted that bank regulators have begun exploring blockchain-based payment systems. Beyond the $3 trillion crypto market, he said the administration’s target appears to be the $100 trillion capital markets, “and I think that’s something that people should pay close attention to.”
Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stu Alderoty, now president of the National Cryptocurrency Association, said internal data shows that 73% of U.S. crypto holders want to see the country become a global leader in the space.
“The government and the industry can now move out of the courtroom and invest in what the U.S. does best — innovation,” Alderoty told CNBC.
Fred Thiel, CEO of bitcoin mining firm MARA Holdings, pointed to early wins for his slice of the industry. He said the administration’s support for mining technology allows companies “to strengthen the U.S. economy and grid.”
Thiel, who participated in the first White House Digital Assets Summit, praised the swift appointment of pro-crypto officials and the launch of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets.
Dan Lawrence CEO of OBM, which manages energy use for industrial-scale mining farms, said the administration’s pro-energy stance has made bitcoin a natural tool for incentivizing new power infrastructure.
“Bitcoin is a great way to incentivize the build out of that power,” Lawrence said.“It’s really great to see bitcoin being acknowledged at the federal level.”
Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.
OpenAI
It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.
Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.
“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”
His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.
Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.
Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”
The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.
“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.
Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.
With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.
The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.
“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.
A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.
‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’
Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.
In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.
Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.
“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”
Competition is fierce.
Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.
The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.
OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.
And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.
While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.
However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.
“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.
Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.
“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”
The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.
“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.
He understands why many people are skeptical.
“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”
There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.
GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.
As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.
Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.
That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).
It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.
You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.
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Tesla is teasing the unveiling of a mysterious new product planned for Tuesday, October 7th this week.
The teaser is ambiguous, which is sparking speculation.
On Sunday, Tesla released a short teaser on X featuring a few seconds of what appears to be a wheel or a fan spinning and ending with the date “10/7”:
Due to the ambiguous nature of Tesla’s teaser, people are speculating as to what the automaker plans to unveil on Tuesday.
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Let us speculate.
Electrek’s Take
Of course, Tesla being an automaker, people would quickly think this is a wheel. However, due to the alignment and the lack of lugs, I doubt this is a wheel.
If it has to do with a wheel, it would make more sense for this to be a wheel cover.
A wheel cover could indicate that Tesla will unveil the new, stripped-down Model Y. Timing-wise, this makes the most sense, as we have been expecting Tesla to launch the cheaper Model Y early in Q4.
It could also be a fan. What Tesla product could have a fan?
Elon Musk has been discussing Tesla’s potential development of an HVAC system for a long time, but I haven’t seen significant evidence that Tesla has been actively working on it.
The next-gen Roadster? Maybe Tesla has put some fans for downforce? The timing of that could also make sense, as Musk has been promising a demo by the end of the year. However, we heard that one a few times before.
Several media outlets are reporting that Ferrari is set to unveil its first electric car this week, so Tesla may be looking to steal some of its shine.
What do you think Tesla is teasing here? Let us know in the comment section below.
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