Trump's Son Buoys Enthusiasm at Singapore's Big Crypto Meet

A high-profile crypto conference in Singapore has bolstered regional enthusiasm for the sector, which has enjoyed a big jump in support this year.

Around 25,000 people gathered at TOKEN2049, a two-day conference that ended on Thursday, where many hailed US President Donald Trump for his backing of the crypto industry, and some predicted stablecoins would be a digital currency business worth trillions.

Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr, was one of the speakers at the event, along with China-born entrepreneur Justin Sun, while punters collected merchandise from crypto firms.

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The annual Singapore edition of TOKEN2049 took place in the midst of a boom in Asia – total crypto transaction volume in the region grew to $2.36 trillion as of June, up from $1.4 trillion a year earlier, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.

The conference also bolstered Singapore’s efforts to promote itself as a global crypto hub, though a series of high-profile crashes in recent years dealt a blow to those ambitions and led authorities to tighten regulatory scrutiny.

Three years ago, the sector was rocked by the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin, and corporate failures at FTX, high-profile disasters which ushered in a ‘crypto winter.’ Yet those darker and more risky days seem but a memory.

For financial conservatives, banking regulators and police chiefs across Southeast Asia and the wider region, crypto is a beast that needs close monitoring, because it is the currency most favoured by criminal gangs. And ‘grey money’ networks have flourished amid the frightening growth of scam centres in countries such as Cambodia and Myanmar.

Buoyant mood

Yet the lure of this new digital form of money has spread far beyond Asia, and the mood at the conference seemed free of these concerns.

Some of the conference attendees zoomed along a zipline to get a free backpack, got airbrushed tattoos, tried out a cryotherapy chamber and played pickleball as DJs played thumping music on every floor.

“When I came in this morning and I heard the music, I had chills,” said Hubert Tang, a 60-year-old who works in the operations team for an investment academy in Singapore. “How can this not be the new era?”

Multiple events were spun out from the conference at a five-storey convention centre in the Marina Bay Sands resort, which included more than 120 listed as parties or dinners and a fight night with some crypto industry participants facing off in a boxing ring.

Nine of the parties on yachts and local nightclub Zouk were bought out for 500 conference attendees on Thursday, with the club accepting crypto payments – from bitcoin to ethereum, USDC, Tether and Binance Pay.

Americans’ bullish stance

“Secretary (Scott) Bessent with the (US) Treasury predicted that the stablecoin global market cap would be above $1 trillion in the next couple of years,” former White House crypto policy executive Bo Hines said.

Hines is now CEO of Tether’s newly created US-based stablecoin venture. “It’s a very conservative estimate. I think it can be much greater than that.”

In a reversal of participants’ mixed feelings about Trump’s impact on the crypto industry at the TOKEN2049 conference held in Dubai in May, most panelists at the Singapore edition were optimistic about his support for the sector.

Once a crypto sceptic, Trump has launched his own cryptocurrency and supported the industry with a law to create a regulatory regime for dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies that are known as stablecoins.

“(President Trump) has single-handedly saved the crypto industry from people who wanted to ruin it, and he’s brought crypto back to its rightful home, the United States of America,” said Zach Witkoff, son of President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, on Wednesday, sitting next to Donald Trump Jr on the stage (as seen above).

Witkoff and Trump Jr reiterated their bullish stance on cryptocurrencies and spoke at length about the progress that the industry has made under the Trump administration. Their comments were at times met with cheers from the floor.

“I think stablecoins are going to be the thing that backfills all of these countries that used to buy US Treasuries,” Trump Jr said.

“We’re going to do that, and that’s going to create and maintain the dollar hegemony that’s allowed America to lead, that’s allowed us to have the power over the world that has kept so many places safe, sound and strong.”

Ophelia Wong, who works in the food and agriculture industry, said she flew in from Hong Kong just for the event, her third time at the conference in the city-state.

“Booming,” said the 62-year-old, who started investing in crypto last year, when asked to describe the industry in one word. “It’s an irreversible journey.”