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BitGo CEO Mike Belshe is feeling good. Not necessarily about the recent market volatility, or the over 9% dip in Bitcoin’s price since the White House crypto summit he attended alongside other leaders in the industry — but about the long-game for crypto in America.

“We finally have regulators that are engaging ... these are conversations that were just all stalled out. So, the fact that they’re not stalled out anymore, I mean, is phenomenal,” Belshe said.

After years of gridlock at the Securities and Exchange Commission and overlapping federal hostilities, Belshe — an early and vocal supporter of crypto advocacy in D.C. — says the dam has broken. “Those brakes are off now,” he said. “Everybody’s working on it.”

Belshe was among one of the crypto industry’s first supporters to the Trump campaign. He even hosted a campaign fundraiser event in the summer of last year that featured then-running mate JD Vance. At the recent White House Crypto Summit, Belshe sat alongside the likes of Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Strategy CEO Michael Saylor, and the Winklevoss twins. The roundtable focused mostly on high-level issues for crypto in the U.S. and where clarity would be most helpful. At the top of the list: stablecoins.

As Coinage has covered this year, Congress is looking to push through major stablecoin legislation . Even the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial is getting in on the game with their new USD1 stablecoin, which BitGo is helping to launch.

“It’s going to replace all of payments. It’s the bank that you wish you had but you never had,” Belshe said about digital dollars.

But BitGo isn’t just powering the back-end for other stablecoins like USD1, the company is also gearing up to launch its own stablecoin. The idea, Belshe says, is to create a safer, more liquid alternative to banks.

“They are designed for fast liquidity,” he said. “They’re just better than the banks that we’ve had in the past that are fractional reserve.”

But it’s not just about building something better. It’s also about geopolitics. Belshe believes the crypto-native architecture of stablecoins could become a powerful tool for U.S. dollar diplomacy. “We have a president who’s thinking how do we keep the dollar strong… how do you get more dollars out to more people? And I think he’s going to find stablecoins.”

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, who leads the largest stablecoin by market cap, has largely argued much of the same benefits as all stablecoin issuers have been putting on the full-court press to court the approval of Congress . However, the biggest fight, Belshe says, is still brewing: interest-bearing stablecoins. So far, it looks like Congress doesn’t want that to be allowed.

“This is going to be a big, big fight,” he said. “The banking lobby is worried that stablecoins returning interest back to retail would disrupt their business.” But Belshe sees the writing on the wall. “We’re on the right side of history here, man. It’s your money. You deserve the interest back on your money.”

Even if that feature doesn’t make it into the upcoming stablecoin legislation, Belshe sees it as inevitable. “If it doesn’t happen directly in the U.S., it will happen through other means or other vehicles… There’s no stopping interest on stablecoins back to retail. It’s just a matter of time.”

While others in the industry worry about decoupling, inflation, or the Fed's next move, Belshe is laser-focused on the real prize: utility. “Where Bitcoin becomes a win is when people start to use it as a store of value that they actually use for international components,” he said. “That’s where you start to see, like, there’s real value.”

And now — with regulators engaging, a supportive administration in office, and a flood of stablecoin innovation — Belshe says the industry is finally entering its next phase.

“Great milestone achieved,” he said of recent D.C. breakthroughs. “But on to the next thing. Let’s keep going. We got a lot more road to go here before we’re done.”