Trump could be a catalyst for a global pro-crypto shift, Binance CEO says

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The CEO of crypto exchange Binance said he expects U.S. President Trump's "pro-crypto" legislation in the U.S. to spur regulators in other parts of the world to follow suit.

"We have moved from a period where there's big regulatory uncertainty and in many sense, some regulatory hostility towards the industry, to one where the largest economy of the world said 'we want to embrace crypto,'" Binance CEO Richard Teng told CNBC's Arjun Kharpal at CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore on Thursday. 

Under the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, regulators cracked down on the industry in an effort to protect Americans from fraud and money laundering.

"[If] you ask anybody in the crypto industry, people prefer the current administration compared to the last one," Teng said.

Chao Deng, CEO of crypto fund manager HashKey Capital, who spoke alongside Teng at the CONVERGE event, shared that view, saying that under Trump, "the momentum is building, institutional [and] retail adoption [of crypto assets] is immense." 

The comments came after Trump pressed ahead with an executive order to establish a strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies for the U.S. using digital assets seized in criminal and civil forfeiture cases. 

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that in addition to Bitcoin, the strategic reserve would include ether, XRP, Solana's SOL token, and Cardano's ADA coin.

The Binance CEO described the U.S. crypto reserve as a "landmark" issue. "The messaging is the largest government … the biggest capital market in the world is now holding Bitcoin as part of the reserve, [that'll] cause many other governments to think through the issue, to sit up to say, should we start doing