It would be hard to argue that point — almost as hard as trying to pretend that Bitcoin hasn’t been largely captured by MAGA culture as a result. “It’s not a left or a right thing,” insisted cryptocurrency lawyer Zack Shapiro after Vance’s remarks, commentating for the Bitcoin 2025 livestream, recorded from the expo floor. Shapiro was suggesting that there was nothing ideological about investing in a digital asset — it was merely an alternative to traditional finance. In spite of this bipartisan ideal, he sat just steps from places to buy Trump pins, posters, clothes, bedazzled American flag thermoses, even a Trump Bitcoin coffee blend, all mixed in with booths for trading services like Robinhood, mining servers and cooling solutions, and ambiguous AI startups. Several vendors showed off their Cybertrucks, brought to you by Trump vizier and Tesla CEO Elon Musk — Gemini, the crypto exchange of billionaire twins and Trump donors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, had two. A squad of convention staff wore shirts identifying them as “Orange Pill Ambassadors,” in a nod to the kind of meme language beloved by Trump’s online army, particularly the conspiracy theorists. (Orange, the official color of Bitcoin, dominated the palette of the event.) Attendees wore shirts depicting Pepe, the cartoon frog notoriously co-opted by the far right, as Trump, or a Bitcoin token with Trump’s hair; one had an eye-catching gold sequin jacket that read “TRUMP THE GOLDEN AGE.” There were, of course, plenty of variations on the MAGA hat: Make Bitcoin Great Again, but also Make Frying Oil Tallow Again. Outside on the Vegas Strip one scalding hot afternoon, an unhoused man could be seen wearing the original MAGA ballcap, as if Trumpian fervor had overspilled containment.

Inside, the breathless triumphalism continued nonstop. Bitcoin had crossed the $100,000 mark, as anyone could see thanks to a prominent price tracker screen, and investors were told over and over again how smart, innovative, and visionary they were for holding it — not to mention how their passion had propelled Trump back into power. “I think we’re going to the moon, guys,” Donald Trump Jr., a top player in the multiple Trump crypto ventures that have added billions to the family’s fortune, said in a conversation with Chris Pavlovski, founder of the right-wing video streaming platform Rumble. “I mean, it’s gonna be awesome. Just stay in. Stay strong.” In a separate event, he and his brother Eric Trump both shared their forecasts for Bitcoin’s value a year hence: “$170,000, that’s my prediction,” Eric said, with Don Jr. concurring, “I was gonna say between $175 and $150.” The siblings claimed that they had been forced to adopt crypto after running into obstacles at major financial institutions, with Eric noting that they were “the same scumbags who were coming after all of you.” Wall Street made a convenient punching bag for many speakers. “We realized how many of the traditional sort of trad-fi systems were actually broken,” Don Jr. said at one point. “It was a Ponzi scheme that we were a part of, that we didn’t realize we were a part of,” he explained. “We were just so far up in the pyramid that it sort of worked.”     

Headliners took every opportunity to dance on the graves of regulatory agencies gutted under Trump, a project accelerated by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Venture capitalist and Musk ally David Sacks, now serving as Trump’s czar for crypto and AI, gleefully read a list of Trump’s actions on crypto to the Winklevoss twins during a fireside chat. “My personal favorite is that the administration defunded the [Consumer Finance Protection Bureau], which is [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren‘s personal regulatory agency,” he said. The audience wildly cheered the destruction of the CFPB, which as of 2024 had returned more than $20 billion to American consumers harmed by illegal business practices. Reminiscing about the election, Cameron Winklevoss commended Sacks for “courageously” hosting a dinner for Trump at his home in San Francisco, “in the heart of enemy territory,” crediting him for the deluge of Trump endorsements from Silicon Valley oligarchs that followed. “Yeah, this was June 6 of last year,” Sacks said. “I remember that date because that happens to be D-Day, and it felt like this was kind of a big, big event in San Francisco,” he added, comparing his private fundraiser of tech elites to the storming of Normandy. “I’m just a guy from Silicon Valley who hosted a dinner, and then the next thing you know, I’m helping to drive this agenda in Washington.”

Audiences were often told of their strength as a grassroots democratic “movement,” with Bitcoin leveling the playing field for all, but obvious hierarchies of affluence and influence were everywhere. Away from the main stage, Sacks and his ilk spoke to smaller rooms only accessible to those with “Industry” or VIP “Whale” passes that cost thousands of dollars and served as tickets to exclusive parties. (A press pass did not secure admittance.) The night before he spoke at the conference, Vance spoke at a fundraiser — $1 million per person — for the pro-Trump Super PAC MAGA Inc. The Trump sons announced that Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind the platform Truth Social, was raising $2.5 billion to create a bitcoin reserve. Justin Sun, a Chinese-born entrepreneur and crypto billionaire, was a prominent whale in attendance. He has invested at least $75 million into $WLFI, the digital token of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial exchange; afterward, the SEC froze its civil fraud suit against him and his companies. (Under Trump, the agency has suspended many such enforcement actions in the crypto space, while the Justice Department has disbanded its crypto fraud unit.) Prior to Trump’s second term, Sun couldn’t travel to the U.S. for fear of arrest because of alleged financial crimes, but days before Bitcoin 2025, he attended a dinner at Trump’s golf club outside Washington, D.C., for the biggest investors in the president’s meme coin, $TRUMP. In Vegas, he held a talk in which he said that Trump’s moves to bolster crypto had allowed Bitcoin’s price to soar. 

Rarely could you forget about the fresh alliance between Trump boosters and crypto believers. Republican Sens. Cynthia Lummis, Bill Hagerty, and Marsha Blackburn, along with GOP Reps. Tom Emmer, Byron Donalds, and Bryan Steil, all made appearances. Rep. Brian Jack joined Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita on stage for a panel called “The Next Golden Age of America.” When politicians addressed the crowd, the digital displays above the audience typically shifted into an American flag pattern. 

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who became a vocal Trump ally after the president helped him get his corruption charges dropped, gave a disjointed speech comparing Bitcoin investors to Betsy Ross, apocryphally known as the creator of the Revolutionary era U.S. flag, and likening crypto to trading “shells” for “goods and services” in 1200 BCE. He had put on a T-shirt with the logo for Nakamoto Inc., a Bitcoin treasury company and sponsor for the convention, over his dress shirt, calling it his “uniform” for the day. He announced that New York would pursue a “Bit Bond,” a way of backing government debt with Bitcoin. (Adams has a history of making unusual headlines in connection to cryptocurrency, as when he accepted his first three paychecks as mayor in crypto. It emerged a day after his convention appearance that a city detective assigned to Adams’ security detail is currently under investigation for his alleged involvement in a case of an Italian cryptocurrency trader who was allegedly kidnapped and tortured in an attempt to gain his Bitcoin password, a scheme known as a “wrench attack.”)

It was clear that Adams and others in government saw the populist advantages of Trump’s embrace of crypto. Member of British parliament Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing party Reform U.K. and architect of the Brexit movement, declared that the approach was having an influence across the pond. Enthusiastically introduced as “potentially the next leader of the U.K.,” the longstanding Trump ally said he wanted to emulate the president’s actions on crypto and unveiled proposed legislation for his country titled the “Crypto Assets and Digital Finance Bill.” Farage also said that Reform “are the first political party in Britain who can accept donations in Bitcoin and other crypto currencies.” 

The more fringe pro-crypto right-wingers, of course, had their own ways of making a splash: At night, trucks drove up and down Las Vegas Boulevard bearing digital billboards for TEXITcoin, a culture-war token based on the supposed need for “the secession of Texas from the crumbling United States.”

You could feel a bit sorry for the ordinary vendors trying to promote their businesses in this radically charged environment. One enterprising man just walked around the expo floor with a sign that said “Raising Angel Round,” followed by more information in type too small to read as he breezed through the crowds. Some wanted to model their bitcoin mining equipment, or modular trailers for housing servers. Others looked to land consulting clients, like Manny Alfaro of the noise reduction contractors Absolute Noise Control, who tells Rolling Stone that Bitcoin miners are finding cheap power near residential areas and sometimes causing noise pollution throughout the night. “It’s definitely been a newer issue that we’re starting to deal with,” he says, since a lot of server farms used to be “out in the middle of nowhere.” 

But for every practical pitch like this, a few more might raise eyebrows. Take Citizen X, which aims to “diversify your passport portfolio.” To that end, it recently acquired Plan B Passport, which has helped more than 11,000 people secure a passport from another country that offers citizenship by investment — including Turkey, El Salvador, and various Caribbean nations — offering tax advantages and protections against “wealth confiscation.” Then you have Tax Network USA, whose booth signage encouraged attendees to “ask us about tax avoidance.” CJ Whisnant, an attorney for the firm, explains that “we can set [clients] up in a new entity structure where they’re being taxed at a lower rate, taking advantage of other deductions that might not be available for an individual,” or put assets “in a trust, setting them up with a registered agent in Wyoming, for example.” (For some reason, the booth was giving away stickers that said “Property of Hunter Biden.”) 

While it was no mystery why these companies showed up, a few seemed more out of place. Bas Kools, founder Geoship, which is engineering the tools to create bioceramic dome dwellings that are more environmentally sustainable than traditional homes, said he was at the conference because some of the company’s earliest investors were Bitcoin advocates. “I do think there’s questions to be asked about the [bitcoin] mining, and I’m not necessarily the one to answer that,” he says to a question about the significant carbon emissions from the process. “Yeah, I’m curious how that’s going to develop,” he added. 

Apart from these outliers, it appeared that everyone and everything at Bitcoin 2025 was focused on spreading the gospel of Bitcoin, and the importance of being allowed to mine, trade, and manage cryptocurrency without interference from the state — or, ideally, with its encouragement. You could see this in everything from books for sale titled Would Mao Hold Bitcoin? to the warm reception for Trump-appointed SEC commissioner Hester Peirce, head of a Crypto Task Force. Peirce said that when your crypto investment goes awry, you should “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, learn from it and do better next time” — as opposed to asking, “hey, crypto mom, where’s my bailout fund?”

Despite these surroundings, Marissa Streit, CEO of the right-wing nonprofit PragerU, who attended the conference as part of the organization’s push for “financial literacy,” didn’t quite agree that crypto had melded with the MAGA movement. “In general, the moment Trump touches it, suddenly it’s considered toxic,” she tells Rolling Stone. “So, you know, if Donald Trump eats hamburgers every day now, everybody’s gonna hate hamburgers.” A curious example, perhaps, since Trump is known to enjoy hamburgers, a food that has not waned in popularity as a result, and is never the subject of politicized conventions. As to the matter of crypto investors in Trump’s meme coin effectively buying access to him at events like the one held at his golf club, Streit is dismissive. “That’s not the government,” she says. “That’s what he’s currently doing. That’s what his family is doing.”