In the grand scheme of the 2024 election, cryptocurrency is not a big deal. It ranks extremely low on the list of priorities for most voters, if it even registers at all. Crypto isn't really a big deal in the broader financial system either. And yet it's playing a big role in politics, including at the very top of the ticket.
Crypto corporations have dumped some $119 million into this year's federal elections, more than any other industry. Crypto-backed groups have worked against Democratic figures such as Sen. Katie Porter and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, both of whom lost their primaries, and now they're backing Sen. Sherrod Brown's Republican opponent in Ohio, Bernie Moreno, to the tune of some $30 million. Through super PACs, crypto money is flowing to downballot candidates on both sides of the aisle. The groups have largely steered clear of the presidential race, but both candidates have taken notice of crypto's influence. Former President Donald Trump has been courting crypto-focused voters and is trying to launch some sort of digital-asset venture of his own. Vice President Kamala Harris is paying lip service to crypto, too. If you can't beat the crypto bros, join 'em, or at least give them a wink and a nod.
Trump and Harris have different reasons to try to attract the crypto community — donors, voters, the fact that the former president likes anyone who flatters him, etc.
To some extent, it's a "might as well"-type situation. Except for the people who really care about crypto, nobody actually cares about crypto, so being nice about it is basically free. And in a race with a razor-thin margin, everything counts — including, maybe, the vote of some dogecoin-loving guy in a crucial Wisconsin county or an extra few thousand dollars from a tech donor who had been sitting on the sidelines.
Trump has not always been a fan of crypto. Back in 2021, he said it seemed like a scam and described it as a "disaster waiting to happen." On the 2024 campaign trail, however, Trump has been happy to embrace the community. This summer he appeared at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, where he vowed to make the United States the "crypto capital of the planet" and told the audience to "have fun" with their bitcoin and the other things they were playing with. He also attended an accompanying fundraiser, where tickets maxed out at $844,600.
Big names in the arena, such as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Gemini and Facebook fame, have thrown their support behind Trump. He's made all sorts of promises about crypto, including that he'd create a "strategic national bitcoin stockpile" and that under his watch, crypto rules would be written by people who "love" the industry rather than "hate" it.
With Trump, you always have to view almost everything he does through the transactional lens.
So why the flip-flop? For one thing, crypto is sort of a natural fit for Trump. It has a libertarian and freedom-focused bent that aligns more naturally with the GOP, even though Trump is far from a libertarian. Its fans/users/investors are disproportionately young men, a constituency whose vote the Republican nominee is courting. There's donor money to be had here, and his campaign knows it. Not to mention that Trump has long been into weird, sketchy business ventures, and while not all crypto projects are scams, there does seem to be a lot of them.
"With Trump, you always have to view almost everything he does through the transactional lens," said Adam Kovacevich, the founder and CEO of Chamber of Progress, a left-leaning tech-industry coalition.
All of Trump's courting of the crypto industry is possible because Democrats left open an opportunity for him to pounce. President Joe Biden's administration — namely Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission — has taken an antagonistic stance toward crypto. Others in Biden's orbit, such as Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, have been quite tough in their approach to the tech industry more broadly. It left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of powerful people in Silicon Valley and venture capital. That's given Trump a way to make inroads and, in turn, rake in some donor support.
"There's no question that Trump and the Trump campaign were absolutely using crypto as a wedge against Biden because Biden had historically been pretty down on crypto," said Sheila Warren, the CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, an advocacy group.
You can tell that the Trump camp thinks this is a good issue. When I reached out for comment, Brian Hughes, a senior advisor to the campaign, sent over a statement describing "crypto innovators and others in the technology sector" as "under attack" by Harris and the Democrats and arguing that no presidential candidate "has been more supportive of the crypto community" than Trump. The campaign also sent a litany of articles about various criticisms of crypto from left-leaning senators including Elizabeth Warren, Jon Tester, and Bernie Sanders. The Harris campaign declined to comment on the record.
Trump's interest in crypto isn't just political; it's personal — as in his personal finances. The billionaire-ish businessman has disclosed that he owns over $1 million worth of ether. In September, he unveiled his own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. The details remain pretty scant, but some of his kids are into it, including his youngest son, Barron. It's fair to have some skepticism about what it will do, how it will work, and whether it's legitimate. It's fair to have the same questions about Trump's entire crypto pivot, too.
"His original approach on crypto was a common-sense recognition that it was a pyramid scheme, and it's thrown out to the wind because it's been convenient to do so," said Robert Weissman, a copresident of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group. "But to the extent he's able to look at something cleanly when he did, he thought it was a scam. Now he's embraced it as his scam."
Harris' advance into crypto on the campaign trail has been subtler — and more recent — than Trump's. She's not about to tattoo "I <3 BTC" on her forearm or anything; she's just telling the guys (it's almost all guys) who did that that she's open to chat.
The vice president's camp has reportedly been making overtures to the crypto industry for weeks, undertaking the endeavor pretty quickly after Biden dropped out of the race and she became the presumptive nominee. A July report from the Financial Times said her advisors had begun approaching companies to try to "reset" the relationship with the industry and put out feelers about meeting with firms such as Coinbase and Circle. A Politico report from about the same time described crypto advocates as hopeful about Harris, given that she's from California, a tech-heavy state.
In early August, volunteers organized a Crypto4Harris town hall that was attended by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, the Wall Street financier Anthony Scaramucci, and the billionaire investor Mark Cuban. Ron Conway, a Democratic megadonor and venture capitalist who stopped supporting crypto super PACs after they began spending against Sherrod Brown, has been optimistic about Harris. In July, he called for the tech community to unite behind Harris and defeat Trump. "I have known Kamala for decades," he wrote, "and she's been a fighter, a leader, and an advocate for the tech ecosystem since the day we met."
The campaign's outreach inspired some cautious enthusiasm in the crypto community, but there's a difference between a candidate's surrogates saying something and the candidate saying it themselves, which is what some in the industry were waiting for.
In late September, Harris addressed crypto directly at a weekend Wall Street fundraiser in New York, where she said her administration would "encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets while protecting our consumers and investors." A few days later, she reiterated her support in a speech on the economy, saying the US would remain dominant in "AI, quantum computing, blockchain, and other emerging technologies." She's reportedly dispatched aides to do more outreach.
The Biden administration has been so hostile to crypto.
One way to read Harris' efforts is as a sort of olive branch to the tech community, a signal to Silicon Valley, venture capital, and startups that she's not aligned with the Biden administration's hard-nosed approach to tech. It makes it easier for donors who were hesitant to support her to finally throw in, and her openness to conversation puts some tech minds at ease. It's about crypto, but it's also more than that. By coupling mentions of digital assets and blockchain with AI, Harris weaves it into her broader economic message about innovation and entrepreneurship.
"The Biden administration has been so hostile to crypto that the main challenge for the Harris campaign has been to say in a clear and credible way that they recognize that and they want to depart from that strategy," said Rachael Horwitz, the chief marketing officer at Haun Ventures, a venture-capital firm. "It's a big hill to climb because so much trust has been lost." Horwitz added that before Harris' late-September remarks, "there were only campaign surrogates asking the industry to take their word for it that behind the scenes she is more pro-tech and pro-innovation than Biden."
To be sure, Harris hasn't spoken at length about crypto, and what she has said is quite vague and generic. It's a stance a lot of policymakers hold — yes, we want to foster innovation, and yes, we want to protect consumers in the process.
While Molly White, a crypto researcher and critic, described Harris' recent statements about crypto as "middle of the road," she said she thought the crypto industry was "definitely taking an optimistic view."
Ultimately the question is not only what will the candidates say but what will they do.
Horwitz said she saw this as "a longer-term issue that goes beyond statements during a campaign where action is the only real path to signaling to founders and the venture community that whomever is president believes that blockchain technology is here to stay and America should lead."
Crypto is not going to decide the 2024 election; issues like abortion and immigration and the economy and overall vibes are going to do that. But the industry has amassed some significant financial power that it's clearly willing to wield politically, and that can be tough for politicians to ignore. It's got some sway in the political discourse, too, as prominent crypto figures weigh in on the race and deploy their donations accordingly.
"There's a grand narrative of crypto of the industry spending a ton of money and shifting the center of gravity on crypto policy, including by making it something that politicians feel they have to talk about, when it's really overall pretty unimportant and not something on anybody's radar," Weissman said.
A statistic crypto boosters typically deploy is that about one in five Americans have owned crypto, the argument being that that ownership will affect their votes. It's a dubious claim — just because you have $50 in bitcoin doesn't mean it's determining what you do in November. There isn't a huge block of crypto voters up for grabs. But given how close the race is, a light appeal probably doesn't hurt any candidate. Trump is clearly targeting young men, and crypto is a thing they like. The problem is that young men generally aren't rushing to the polls.
Crypto is purple.
"Are they winnable? Sure. Are they going to vote? Who the heck knows," said Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University who researches polling and masculinity. "Getting people under 25, under 30 to vote is hard for any campaign. But getting especially men under 30 to vote, no one even bothers."
The crypto industry doesn't mind the attention it's getting from policymakers. It helps crypto executives get meetings on Capitol Hill to try to craft favorable legislation. It gets them the ears of lawmakers who might ultimately decide how their companies are regulated and by whom. At the presidential level, there are some appointees that the crypto and tech industries would very much like to be out — Gensler at the SEC, Khan at the FTC.
"It's very clear from a lot of the reporting that Harris has gotten an earful from people in the business community about Gensler and crypto and about Lina Khan and the FTC," Kovacevich, at the Chamber of Progress, said.
Crypto companies, like most businesses, don't really want to make partisan enemies. To get things done in Washington, it's a good idea to have friends on both sides of the aisle, even if not everyone is a bestie.
"Crypto is purple," Warren, from the Crypto Council for Innovation, said.
What Harris or Trump will actually do on crypto is unclear, but that's not really the point right now. The point is to make nice with tech and try to win in November.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.