- This is an excerpt from the Insider Today newsletter.
- You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.
The crypto community keeps racking up wins.
President-elect Donald Trump lived up to his self-appointed title of "crypto president" by picking a big supporter of digital assets to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Trump nominated Paul Atkins, who served as an SEC commissioner under George W. Bush, for the role of Wall Street's top cop. Atkins has been a part of the Token Alliance, an advocacy group for crypto, since 2017.
That wasn't the only victory the "hodlers" were celebrating. Bitcoin surpassed the all-important $100,000 mark for the first time on Wednesday. It's the latest in a historic run for an industry still basking in the afterglow of what a Trump win means for its market.
Atkins, if confirmed, is a stark contrast to current SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who already announced his intentions to step down in January.
A former Goldman Sachs partner who also taught a class on blockchain at MIT, Gensler didn't initially draw the ire of the crypto world. It wasn't long before he started ruffling feathers — to put it mildly — with his push for more oversight and attempts to stop some new products from coming to market.
So while the bar for getting an SEC leader the crypto community liked more than Gensler was essentially on the floor, Atkins, who has spent the past few years advising crypto companies, is a best-case scenario for digital-asset supporters.
Trump's picks for the key people overseeing the economy and Wall Street are now mostly in.
While some of his nominations have turned heads — leading a few to even withdraw from consideration — Trump's finance-focused selections are viewed as more traditional.
Howard Lutnick, Trump's pick for commerce secretary, found success beyond the financial services firm (Cantor Fitzgerald) and the brokerage (BGC Group) he runs.
He also orchestrated the purchase of commercial real estate services firm Newmark in 2011 for a little more than $60 million. In the years since he's helped turn Newmark into a real-estate powerhouse with a market cap of roughly $3.8 billion, writes Business Insider's Dan Geiger.
Meanwhile, Scott Bessent, Trump's Treasury pick, is also unsurprising. (Elon Musk even labeled him a "business-as-usual pick.") The billionaire investor spent time as George Soros' righthand man before launching his own hedge fund.
The picks haven't elicited the strong reactions other members of his proposed Cabinet have, but maybe that's the point. What the market hates more than anything is uncertainty, and with this group, it seems, what you see is what you get.
The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Spriha Srivastava, UK bureau chief, in London. Amanda Yen, fellow, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.