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 space enthusiast, who just months ago commanded the world's first all-civilian mission to reach orbit.

He's also a crypto billionaire.

Isaacman is the founder of Shift4, a fintech company that provides secure payment processing solutions for businesses. The company's stock price has jumped almost 40% this year, lifting its market cap to $9.3 billion. Isaacman started the business in 1999 at age 16 and took 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 demonstrated exceptional leadership, building a trailblazing global financial technology company."

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

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

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

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

But while Elon Musk was touting dogecoin and money was pouring into nonfungible tokens, 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 virtually synonymous with U.S. dollar-pegged tokens. Today, they're collectively worth around $200 billion and are often used to move money across borders at a fraction of the cost of legacy payment systems.

Wilson, 31, said the group around the table at Isaacman's house "all agreed it was more likely that stablecoins would become a regular medium of exchange than bitcoin or ethereum." They wanted to build products that took advantage of blockchain but were token agnostic.

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

In front of the whiteboard with marker in hand, Isaacman walked through ways crypto could be applied 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 employees.

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

Duffy and Wilson are now helming Shift4's crypto team. In October, they announced a Pay with Crypto service that's being rolled out to all 200,000 of the platform's merchants, making it possible to spend crypto at hotels, restaurants and stadiums.

"It's the biggest step toward crypto payments becoming mainstream that the industry has ever had," Wilson said.

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

Isaacman finds 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 election win in November, which came alongside congressional victories for pro-crypto candidates. Bitcoin topped $108,000 on Tuesday for the first time, up more than 55% since election night, and the overall market cap of tokens has soared past $3.7 trillion.

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

Stablecoins have moved closer to the mainstream as well.

In October, Stripe agreed to pay $1.1 billion for Bridge 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 call for traditional credit card companies.

Visa and Mastercard currently dominate U.S. payments, accounting for 80% of all credit card volume in the U.S., according to data from the Nilson Report. Credit card networks charge a transaction fee to a payment processor like 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 Express, generally get passed along to the customer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In October, Visa announced the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP) to make it easier for banks to launch their own stablecoins. Cuy Sheffield, Visa's head 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 said.

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

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

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 eroding confidence in the reserves backing certain stablecoins.

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

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

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

"That's why you see the leading 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 offer safeguards for these dollarized digital assets and the companies issuing them. Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, one of the industry's loudest voices in Washington, told CNBC in September that the company has seen a lot of traction with stablecoins.

"Crypto started off as really focused on trading, and it's now made a big shift toward utility, specifically payments," said Armstrong. He said stablecoin volume reached $10 trillion last year, and that could double or triple this year, "so it's been a huge growth story for crypto as people start to think about how to make the dollar faster, cheaper and more global."

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

Wilson said the company views stablecoins in the context of two different target markets. One group consists of people who have gotten rich in crypto and want 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 just want to spend stablecoins for daily payments because Visa and Mastercard adoption is low," he said.

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

Standard Chartered wrote in a recent report that stablecoins are currently equivalent in size to 1% of financial transactions in the U.S. and a similar percentage of foreign exchange transactions. As they gain legitimacy, a move to 10% is "feasible," the bank said.

As Shift4 tries to position itself at the forefront of what it hopes to be a continued wave 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, commanding crews on multiday trips around the Earth. His spaceflight ambitions have fostered an increasingly close relationship with SpaceX CEO Musk, who became one of Trump's biggest backers and is poised to have an outsized role in the administration.

On Dec. 4, Isaacman wrote a letter addressed to his "Shift4 Family," telling investors and employees that until his appointment is confirmed by the Senate, he will remain as CEO.

"Shift4 has been my life's work since I was 16 years old," wrote Isaacman, who dropped out of school and built the company from his parents' basement. "But it is my time to serve and give back to the nation that enabled me to live the American dream."

Isaacman said his choice to lead NASA "reflects my passion for advancing humankind's reach among the stars, unlocking the secrets of the universe, and improving life on Earth along the way."

Wilson recalled a dinner with Issacman in March 2022 after The Giving Block transaction closed. They were in Las Vegas, and Isaacman brought Wilson and Duffy to an Italian restaurant called Lago at the Bellagio on the eve of the announcement. Wilson remembers discussing what it was like when Isaacman started his business as a teenager.

"No one cares more and works harder than the founder, and it really shows with Jared," Wilson said.