US govt puts GDP data on the public blockchain in Trump's crypto push

By Josh Wingrove, Olga Kharif and Jennifer A. Dlouhy

  The US government on Thursday began distributing gross domestic product data on public blockchains, marking the latest Trump administration endorsement of the crypto industry.  

The move, as described by Commerce Department officials, will create another avenue — not a replacement — for publishing the economic data. 

The Commerce Department’s adoption of blockchain to carry some of its most critical and market-moving economic data amounts to a US government seal of approval on the technology that’s increasingly being used for trading everything from money-market funds to stocks, beyond its origins in cryptocurrency. 

“The entire administration has embraced this,” said Mike Cahill, chief executive officer of Douro Labs, who said he’s been working with the Commerce Department on the effort for about two months. “With today’s announcement we are now in a world where government data lives on blockchains, and market participants can participate in real time.” 

The government’s effort initially targets nine blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. The plan is to put a so-called cryptographic hash of the data — essentially, a tool to verify its integrity — on those blockchains.  

President Donald Trump’s administration intends to seek to expand the scope of the initiative later, the Commerce Department officials said.  

Government Shift 

The shift comes weeks after Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after an agency report showed much weaker job growth in recent months than previously reported, with the president suggesting without evidence that the numbers had been manipulated for political purposes. 

Commerce Department officials said the blockchain initiative is unrelated to the BLS ouster.  

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was behind the push to publish data on the blockchain, the officials said. Earlier this year, Lutnick also suggested that he planned to change how GDP is reported in order to remove the impact of government spending. The figure is published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is housed within the Commerce Department.

 

Governments have been tinkering with blockchains for years, as some used public networks to test central bank digital currencies and others mulled employing the technology as a way to digitally issue credentials.  

For instance, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has used Avalanche blockchain — another one of the nine in the Commerce statistics rollout — to digitize car titles. And the Department of Homeland Security has weighed using the technology to expedite passenger screening at airports. 

Earlier this year, under billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency also explored using blockchain to reduce costs and increase government transparency.  

‘Crypto President’ 

Lutnick teased the change during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, telling Trump that departmental statistics would start to be issued via blockchain “because you are the crypto president.”  

Trump, once a skeptic of cryptocurrencies, is now an industry champion, having vowed during his 2024 campaign to ease regulatory burdens weighing on its growth.  

And he’s moved swiftly in office to make good on some of those promises. For instance, Trump has already created a Bitcoin reserve and a government stockpile of coins including Ether and Solana. He’s appointed crypto-friendly agency heads, who ended enforcement cases against the likes of the biggest US crypto exchange, Coinbase Global Inc. And he signed a law regulating stablecoins, whose value is supposed to stay stable to underlying fiat.  

Trump’s family has also vastly expanded its crypto empire, with forays into everything from Bitcoin mining to issuing a stablecoin. Next week, a coin hatched by World Liberty Financial, a Trump family-backed venture, will begin trading on centralized exchanges. 

It’s a marked shift in fortunes from recent years, under former President Joe Biden, when government regulators took a more skeptical view of cryptocurrencies.  

Political Force 

The government’s adoption also reflects an evolution for the crypto industry itself. Years ago, many commercial efforts to deploy the technology fizzled because of their focus on using private blockchains, posing higher costs and challenges since they were managed by companies that often disagreed on policies. 

But under Lutnick, the Commerce Department is harnessing public blockchains such as Ethereum, which are operated by computers located all over the world and rely on software updated by volunteer programmers. 

Crypto exchanges Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini are involved in the Commerce Department effort, the officials said. The department used the exchanges to buy cryptocurrency needed to pay for posting transactions on the blockchains — something called “gas.” Kraken and Gemini are planning to go public in the coming months. 

The crypto industry has been cemented as a political force, with investors and executives using well-funded political action committees in ways that echo how traditional finance industries like banks have wielded power in Washington. 

The industry donated heavily to Trump’s reelection campaign and backed many crypto-friendly politicians in Congress. The industry, including Coinbase, invested more than $133 million in three super political action committees backing crypto-friendly candidates in the 2024 election, according to data analyzed by OpenSecrets. 

Kraken, Coinbase and others also donated $1 million each to the president’s January inauguration.  

Lutnick suggested earlier this week that crypto could be used to disseminate far more than just economic indicators.  

“We are going to put our GDP on the blockchain, so people can use the blockchain for data distribution, and then we’re going to make that available to the entire government, so all of you can do it,” Lutnick told other federal agency heads meeting with Trump on Tuesday. 

--With assistance from Molly Smith.