President Donald Trump’s new crypto guy, Patrick Witt, is picking up the baton from his predecessor Bo Hines in goading lawmakers to finish sweeping U.S. crypto policies and pushing regulators to put the new stablecoin law into practice, he said in an interview with CoinDesk.
Working under the administration’s crypto czar, David Sacks, Witt is the new point of contact for crypto matters in the White House, having taken over after the brief tenure of his predecessor, Hines, who went on to work for stablecoin giant Tether. While Hines saw the conversion of Congress’ stablecoin effort into law and was able to attend the White House ceremony to cement it, he left shortly after, leaving a lengthy crypto to-do list for Witt.
“There’s no drop off here,” said Witt, who was elevated to the job last month, just two weeks after the administration issued its wide-reaching strategy report for tackling U.S. crypto policy. “We’re keeping the pedal to the metal with all of the different initiatives on the legislative front and the interagency actions recommended in the report.”
Witt will speak at CoinDesk’s Policy and Regulation event in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.
In his first interview since becoming the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets, he said his three top priorities are the Senate’s work on market structure legislation, getting a speedy implementation of the stablecoin law known as the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act and setting up a federal crypto stockpile.
Of the Senate’s legislative work, seen last week when a draft bill emerged from Senate Banking Committee, Witt said this latest version has shown “significant improvements.”
“Generally, the reception has been positive,” he noted, adding that those working on it are seeking input from Democrats, because several of them need to be on board for it to pass the 60-vote margin there. “You know, our interest here is to make sure that we’re listening to all parties in the space, that we’re working to get something that moves the ball forward,” said the former college quarterback for the Yale Bulldogs.
Though the effort missed the August deadline initially set by Trump, Witt said the White House is “keeping the pressure up from this side.”
He said his office is in “regular touch” with the two committees working on the bill. The banking panel circulated its draft, but the Senate Agriculture Committee has been trailing. Both of them will need to finish legislation, open their efforts to member input and vote to forward them to the Senate floor before the Senate can take a final vote — where it will need hefty bipartisan support to advance. And Witt said that the market structure bill written by the Senate should be something the House of Representatives can approve without further haggling, even though the House already approved its own version, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.
“We’re confident that what comes out in the Senate is ultimately going to be a product that the House can also support,” he said, which is what happened previously with the GENIUS Act — a Senate bill that the House of Representatives approved with a wide, bipartisan majority.
So far, one of the most urgent general objections voiced by congressional Democrats has been Trump’s personal stake in the industry, which has reportedly gained the president and his family billions of dollars in revenue, investment gains and equity stakes. That conflict-of-interest argument is one Witt — much like his predecessor — dismissed as illegitimate.
“It’s like saying any private citizen has a conflict when we strengthen America’s economy,” Witt argued. “This is a win for America. It’s not a win for any particular group of individuals.”
Among the president’s most high-profile crypto initiatives has been his order calling for the formation of a so-called Bitcoin Strategic Reserve that would hold government-seized bitcoin BTC$112,796.16 as a long-term investment. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has been delving into how to establish a bitcoin stockpile and a separate reserve of all other types of cryptocurrency.
“It is a top priority for me, personally, for this office, for the administration,” Witt said. He added it’s not there yet, because the work “presents some novel legal questions that we just need to get resolved.” He said the White House is also aiming for legislative backing from Congress, so his office is working to figure out how to get to a “passable” bill that establishes the reserve in law.
And he had no new details to share on how the administration might keep growing that bitcoin fund beyond the government bitcoin seizures it’ll start the reserve with, only that the administration is contemplating “some creative ways that we can get at accumulation with existing authorities.”
Compared with Hines, Witt has a deeper well of policy and executive-branch experience to draw from. He spent three years at McKinsey & Co., and served stints at the Office of Personnel Management in the first Trump presidency and some time at the Department of Defense, where he was a deputy undersecretary. That insider background may aid him in helping usher the federal regulators toward an implementation of the stablecoin law Trump already signed, he said.
“I know what that’s like from the agencies,” he said. “So hopefully I can bring a good perspective to what’s achievable there and how to approach it in the right way.”
But the Senate’s ongoing answer to the Clarity Act is the most urgent item on the agenda.
“GENIUS was a huge win, but as David Sacks likes to say, it addresses a relatively small portion of the overall crypto market,” Witt said. “This bill addresses the remaining — call it 80% of it. So this one’s huge, and we want to make sure that we don’t drop the ball, that we get it done.”
Read More: Who Is Patrick Witt, President Trump’s Next Senior Adviser on Crypto?