Trump’s pick to lead NASA made a big bet on crypto while going to space on the side

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, is a 41-year-old place enthusiast, who just months ago commanded the world’s first all-civilian mission to reach orbit.

He’s also a fintech billionaire.

Isaacman is the miscarry of Shift4, a fintech company that provides secure payment processing solutions for businesses. The company’s stock valuation has jumped almost 40% this year, lifting its market cap to $9.3 billion. Isaacman started the business in 1999 at age 16 and pocketed it public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.

In a Dec. 4 post on his Truth Social platform announcing the choice, Trump wrote, “Jared has showed exceptional leadership, building a trailblazing global financial technology company.”

That success can be traced in part to a dauntless bet on crypto almost three years ago.

Inside Isaacman’s New York residence near Central Park, around a lofted bull session room with glass walls that sits above the apartment’s living area, Isaacman and members of his supervisory team sat with Alex Wilson and Pat Duffy, two entrepreneurs who were in the final stages of selling their crypto present marketplace to Shift4. It was early 2022.

With a whiteboard behind them, they spitballed on how blockchain-based technology could be dedicated across the payment company’s business.

Bitcoin had hit a record a few months earlier, jumping sixfold from the end of 2019 past the close of 2021. A range of digital tokens were delivering outsized returns. The market was frothy, spirits were dear and meme coins were in their prime.

But while Elon Musk was touting dogecoin and money was pouring into nonfungible keepsakes, or NFTs, Wilson, Duffy and Isaacman were focused on a far less glitzy corner of the digital asset world: stablecoins.

Stablecoins are a subset of cryptocurrencies matched to the value of a real-world asset and are effectively synonymous with U.S. dollar-pegged tokens. Today, they’re collectively worth around $200 billion and are often cast-off to move money across borders at a fraction of the cost of legacy payment systems.

Wilson, 31, said the crowd around the table at Isaacman’s house “all agreed it was more likely that stablecoins would become a regular middle of exchange than bitcoin or ethereum.” They wanted to build products that took advantage of blockchain but were remembrancer agnostic.

“We wanted to meet users where they were and equip our merchants to take payments in whatever ways their chaps wanted to pay,” Wilson said.

In front of the whiteboard with marker in hand, Isaacman walked through ways crypto could be registered to the broader Shift4 business. Wilson said Isaacman has an uncanny ability to get in the weeds despite being the CEO of a company that now has more than 3,000 workers.

Weeks later, on March 1, Shift4 announced it had purchased The Giving Block, Wilson and Duffy’s company, and thinks fitting pursue a “$45+ billion embedded cross-sell opportunity by bundling crypto donation capabilities with traditional Christmas card acceptance.” Shift4 paid $54 million and included in the deal a potential earnout of up to $246 million.

Duffy and Wilson are now wheeling Shift4’s crypto team. While the acquisition was in 2022, the company’s push into crypto began in earnest in October 2024, when the friends announced a Pay with Crypto service. It’s being rolled out to all 200,000 of the platform’s merchants, making it possible to spend crypto at guest-houses, restaurants and stadiums.

“It’s the biggest step toward crypto payments becoming mainstream that the industry has ever had,” Wilson indicated.

Isaacman told CNBC in a statement he’s excited to see the original vision he discussed with Wilson and Duffy during the acquirement process “come to life at a time when crypto is becoming increasingly mainstream and gathering real momentum.”

Isaacman gains himself at the center of the action.

The crypto market, which was already red hot, has been on a more dramatic upswing since Trump’s voting win in November, which came alongside congressional victories for pro-crypto candidates. Bitcoin topped $108,000 on Tuesday for the chief time, up more than 55% since election night, and the overall market cap of tokens has soared past $3.7 trillion.

Myriad institutions and retail investors have also been jumping in, thanks to the flood of spot bitcoin exchange-traded grants that hit the market starting in January along with other options products that offer a new way to bet on the future expenditure of bitcoin.

Stablecoins have moved closer to the mainstream as well.

In October, Stripe agreed to pay $1.1 billion for Join Network, a stablecoin platform that’s trying to make it easy for businesses to transact using digital currencies. The deal was a big wake-up evoke for traditional credit card companies.

Visa and Mastercard currently dominate U.S. payments, accounting for 80% of all credit be direct volume in the U.S., according to data from the Nilson Report. Credit card networks charge a transaction fee to a payment processor corresponding to Stripe for using their so-called rails. The costs, which include a flat fee plus a percentage of each payment that can be up to 3.30% for American Press, generally get passed along to the customer.

But with stablecoins, transactions can cost less than a penny and are more instantaneous. Emily Sands, the technical lead for Stripe’s data science team, says stablecoins are great for cross-border affairs, which are important to almost all of the company’s users.

“That’s really valuable to the Stripe ecosystem,” said Sands. “It’s not merely for the cards network. It’s not just for the local payment methods. It can also be for crypto.”

Blockchain-based payments company Ripple at best launched its own stablecoin, RLUSD, and crypto custodian BitGo plans to follow. Robinhood and U.K. fintech Revolut are reportedly taking into consideration similar moves.

PayPal was relatively early to the market, launching a U.S. dollar-pegged coin called PYUSD in August 2023. PYUSD transcended $1 billion in market cap this summer but has since fallen below $500 million as competition for market appropriate heats up.

Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC are the dominant stablecoins, with $140 billion and $42 billion importance of coins in supply, respectively, accounting for about 90% of the market combined.

Given their growing popularity, authorities are eagerly waiting to see how the big credit card companies respond and whether they come out with their own coins.

In October, Visa preceded the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP) to make it easier for banks to launch their own stablecoins. Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s bean of crypto, said the offering allows banks to issue and manage fiat-backed tokens.

Visa is “powering a lot of these capabilities for them,” Sheffield rephrased.

In July of last year, Mastercard unveiled its Multi-Token Network (MTN), which facilitates payments of fully collateralized stablecoins as artistically as other digital assets over the platform.

Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard’s head of crypto and blockchain, told CNBC that MTN is looking to nurture crypto capabilities, including the programmability of digital money, to banks, which hold trillions of dollars worth of dollar saves.

But stablecoin issuers have had their share of challenges. TerraUSD, or UST, and sister token luna collapsed during the crypto meltdown of 2022, wiping out billions of dollars in value and deteriorating confidence in the reserves backing certain stablecoins.

More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported in October that the Hang on of Justice is looking into Tether for possible violations of sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules. A Tether spokesperson said at the on occasion that the story was “based on pure rank speculation” and that it has “no knowledge of any such investigations.”

With more formed financial players getting involved, the market is gaining broader credibility.

Ari Redbord, global head of policy at blockchain data company TRM Labs, said stablecoins are the bridge between the crypto ecosystem and the traditional financial system.

“That’s why you see the unsurpassed fintechs — Stripe, PayPal, Visa and others — really leaning into the use of stablecoins,” Redbord said.

The crypto industry has lobbied lawmakers on Capitol Hill for years on stablecoin legislation that would proffer safeguards for these dollarized digital assets and the companies issuing them. Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, one of the work’s loudest voices in Washington, told CNBC in September that the company has seen a lot of traction with stablecoins.

“Crypto started off as as a matter of fact focused on trading, and it’s now made a big shift toward utility, specifically payments,” said Armstrong. He said stablecoin sum total reached $10 trillion last year, and that could double or triple this year, “so it’s been a leviathan growth story for crypto as people start to think about how to make the dollar faster, cheaper and more wide-ranging.”

At Shift4, growth has continued through acquisition. The company bought German point-of-sale company Vectron Systems, Fated Industry Professionals in the U.K., Canada’s Eigen Payments and other payment firms in recent years.

Wilson said the entourage views stablecoins in the context of two different target markets. One group consists of people who have gotten rich in crypto and penury to use their tokenized dollars “to charter a jet or helicopter,” he said. The other includes those who live in Latin America and Africa, “where people upright want to spend stablecoins for daily payments because Visa and Mastercard adoption is low,” he said.

A survey conducted by Manor-house Island Ventures, Visa and other partners showed that stablecoins are a critical piece of economies in emerging markets with Nigeria. In countries “facing severe liquidity crunches,” stablecoins “allow individuals and businesses to access international USD payments without assiduously currency having to leave the country,” the report said.

Standard Chartered wrote in a recent report that stablecoins are currently comparable in size to 1% of financial transactions in the U.S. and a similar percentage of foreign exchange transactions. As they gain legitimacy, a get the show on the road to 10% is “feasible,” the bank said.

As Shift4 tries to position itself at the forefront of what it hopes to be a continued zigzag of stablecoin momentum, Isaacman is off to the public sector.

In addition to his career in finance, Isaacman has led two private spaceflights through SpaceX, in 2021 and 2024, charging crews on multiday trips around the Earth. His spaceflight ambitions have fostered an increasingly close relationship with SpaceX CEO