Donald Trump promised thousands of bitcoin enthusiasts over the weekend that as president he would make the United States “the bitcoin superpower of the world,” winning broad support in a market resentful of regulatory scrutiny.

“My job will be to free them,” Trump said.

With enthusiasm pro-crypto speech on Saturdaythe former president has sought to deepen his ties with an industry fed up with perceived persecution at the hands of the Biden administration and has prepared to spend heavily to secure a more crypto-friendly audience in Washington.

Trump’s comments at the annual bitcoin conference in Nashville — a first for a major party presidential candidate — marked a turnaround for a man who just three years ago derided bitcoin as a “fraud” that was a threat to the U.S. dollar.

The positive momentum helped propel bitcoin to a six-week high on Monday, briefly touching $70,000 and nearly reaching its record high of just over $73,000.

“I think he will be the first crypto president,” venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar told the FT.

Crypto’s embrace of Trump comes as it tries to shake off the dark cloud cast by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Friedwho was sentenced this year to 25 years in prison for fraud and repression by US regulators.

Industry executives lament the U.S. government’s aggressive approach toward companies like Coinbase and failure to pass regulations, arguing it risks stifling innovation and pushing American companies overseas.

Cryptocurrency has faced “a brutal assault” under Biden and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, he said Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who calls himself the world’s largest investor in cryptocurrencies, having raised about $8 billion to target the sector, said: “It’s been intensely frustrating and impossible to make progress on this with the White House,” he added.

By contrast, Trump’s position is “a direct, blanket endorsement of the entire space. A complete, blanket, uniform embrace of the entire thing,” he said. “It’s an absolute 180-degree turnaround from what we’ve been experiencing.”

Trump’s appearance in Nashville contrasted sharply with that of Kamala Harris, who has been in recent discussions to speak but decided against it. The biggest names and companies in digital assets are willing to throw their weight behind Trump’s campaign.

Last month, Pishevar co-hosted a fundraiser for Trump in Silicon Valley at the home of investor David Sacks, along with Coinbase executives and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, founders of the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, who donated $1 million in bitcoin to his campaign. Jesse Powell, the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, said he donated $1 million, mostly in ether.

Other Trump mega-donors — Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick — joined attendees in Nashville alongside supporters wearing red “Make Bitcoin Great Again” caps. Outside, a Tesla Cybertruck promoting Bitcoin circled the Nashville conference, sharing a street lined with bachelorette party buses, tractors and pedal-powered taverns.

Trump’s speech on Saturday was full of promises for the U.S. cryptocurrency industry, from calling them “modern Edisons” to commuting the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence for creating the online black market Silk Road.

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He received the biggest applause for promising to fire the industry’s bogeyman, the SEC’s Gary Gensler — who has been a vocal critic of cryptocurrencies.

Under Gensler’s watch, the agency has filed lawsuits against major exchanges including Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini, as well as payments provider Ripple Labs and blockchain software company Consensys, among others, accusing them of violating securities laws. Trump was so taken aback by the raucous roar from the audience that he repeated his vote.

He also promised to end the “crackdown” on Saturday, saying the rules should be “written by people who love their industry, not by people who hate their industry.”

Conference attendees were particularly impressed by Trump’s promise to create a “strategic national stockpile of bitcoin” without ever selling the roughly 210,000 bitcoins that were confiscated by the federal government.

“I think he definitely won some votes,” Fred Thiel, chief executive of cryptocurrency mining company Marathon Digital Holdings, said after meeting Trump.

The Trump campaign’s embrace of crypto has been underway for several months; he has been accepting cryptocurrency payments and has said his campaign has received more than $25 million in cryptocurrency donations. His vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, owned as much as $250,000 in Bitcoin, according to his 2022 financial disclosure form, earning the Republican campaign more plaudits from executives.

The market has also become more politically savvy with its money since the days when Bankman-Fried backed individual politicians. The pro-crypto group Fairshake has become one of the largest super pacs so far this year, raising nearly $203 million, according to filings. The group is backed by Coinbase, Ripple and Andreessen Horowitz, among others, but has no plans to participate in the presidential campaign.

“It is clear [Trump’s] “I’ve long thought about keeping American industry here. Whether it’s protectionism or keeping things onshore, I suspect that’s the underlying principle,” said a senior executive at a U.S. cryptocurrency exchange.

In a sign of Democrats’ concern about the scale of Trump’s support for cryptocurrency, advisers to Kamala Harris have in recent days reached out “restart” relationships between the party and industry, reaching out to people at companies including Coinbase and Ripple, the FT reported.

But not everyone is convinced of Trump’s commitment to cryptocurrencies.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, criticized the market’s self-serving support for Trump. Boosting pro-crypto candidates means that “politicians come to understand that all they need to get their support is to support ‘crypto,’” he wrote in a recent blog post.

Others criticize Trump’s self-serving relationship with the cryptocurrency industry.

“Trump’s views can be bought, as we’ve seen,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, adding that executives were clearly contributing to his campaign to get less onerous regulation so they could make more money.

The Trump campaign “is certainly very smart about where the butter is and which voters might be useful,” said Sheila Warren, chief executive of the Crypto Council for Innovation.

“Running for president and being president are very different things… what he would actually do once he was in office is a different question.”

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