Trump Wants To Put Crypto In Your 401(k)

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump issued an executive order Thursday aimed at opening up workers’ retirement accounts to investments in private equity and risky digital assets.

The White House billed the move as giving working people’s 401(k) accounts the same access to exotic financial instruments that rich people enjoy.

“More than 90 million Americans participate in employer-sponsored defined-contribution plans, and most of those are currently restricted from investing in alternative assets, unlike wealthy investors and retirement plans for government workers,” the White House said in a release.

Crypto skeptics decried the move, the latest from a president who champions crypto-friendly policy while himself promoting his own crypto ventures.

“Stuffing private equity, crypto, and other ‘alternative assets’ into 401(k)s is about propping up scams and bailing out an industry that’s run out of buyers — and it’s being done at the expense of Americans’ retirements everywhere,” said Helaine Olen, managing editor at the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit opposed to concentrated corporate power.

Summer Mersinger, CEO of the Blockchain Association, the top lobbying group for the crypto industry, said that by “allowing Americans to include regulated, diversified crypto exposure in their 401(k) retirement accounts, the administration is expanding consumer choice and empowering individuals to responsibly build wealth using some of the best-performing assets of the past decade.”

The order doesn’t immediately change rules for 401(k) investors, but rather directs the U.S. Department of Labor to revise its guidance for fiduciaries. During the Biden administration, the Labor Department urged fiduciaries to use “extreme care before they consider adding a cryptocurrency option to a 401(k) plan’s investment menu for plan participants.”

In response to the president’s order, U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said the government “should not be making retirement investment decisions for hardworking Americans, including decisions regarding alternative assets.”

Unlike the stocks and bonds that make up most workers’ retirement portfolios, digital assets aren’t based on the value of a company or backed by a government. Instead, their value derives mainly from the continued willingness of other people to continue investing in them. Prices of Bitcoin and other digital assets surged on Thursday on news about Trump’s order.

The crypto industry spent heavily on the presidential race and on congressional campaigns last year and has reaped its reward in the first half of 2025. Earlier this summer, Trump signed into law a bill regulating a type of digital assets known as stablecoins, and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers is hoping to push through another bill creating a favorable regulatory regime for the broader industry.

It’s a remarkable reversal of fortune from when a stablecoin collapse in 2022 caused a broader crypto crash, and a prominent crypto entrepreneur was arrested and charged with fraud. The Biden administration in 2023 declared in a report digital assets offer “no widespread economic benefits.” The industry’s market capitalization on Thursday approached $4 trillion.