As he runs for president, Donald Trump is supporting cryptocurrency, and the cryptocurrency industry is supporting him back.
Even though the former president spoke out against crypto and made policy changes during his first term, it looks like he has persuaded some big names in the industry that he has changed his mind.
Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, wrote on X Thursday, “President Donald J. Trump is the pro-bitcoin, pro-crypto, and pro-business choice.” He also said that he had donated $1 million in bitcoin BTCUSD, 0.05% to Trump’s campaign, and his twin brother and business partner, Cameron Winklevoss, matched that amount.
According to Bloomberg News, the two were given their money back after it was found that they gave more than what is allowed by federal law.
Winklevoss’s 1,400-word post was mostly bad things said about the Biden administration and what he called its “war against crypto.”
He didn’t like some of the things that President Joe Biden and his chosen financial regulators did. For example, he didn’t like how the Securities and Exchange Commission is going after crypto companies that it says are breaking securities laws by selling crypto tokens that should be registered with the agency, like when a public company issues a stock.
Winklevoss didn’t talk about the many times that Trump and his appointees said and did things that were seen as bad for the crypto ecosystem at the time.
In 2019, when Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency project was causing a lot of trouble, Trump said that the value of cryptocurrencies is “based on thin air.”
The crypto industry also harshly criticized his picks, such as former SEC Chair Jay Clayton and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Mnuchin was criticized for his efforts to stop illegal financial transactions by putting strict rules on self-hosted wallets, and Clayton was criticized for his fight against initial coin offerings and for signing off on a controversial lawsuit against Ripple XRPUSD, -0.10%.
Crypto hardliners, on the other hand, are ready to forget about all of that because they think it was all the fault of bad advisors that Trump won’t let back in for a second term.
In a recent article for the Blaze, crypto lawyer Preston Byrne said, “Biden’s attack on crypto that could hand the White House to Trump.” He also praised Trump for making the issue a big part of the 2024 campaign.
Byrne wrote, “If crypto is an issue this cycle, it is only because Donald Trump made it so.”
“It is clear that the Trump campaign’s involvement here was cautious, gradual, and planned,” he said, adding that Trump first talked about bitcoin in a positive light in February, “after a flurry of back-office engagement with the industry.”
After that, there were more attempts, such as an interview with CNBC in March in which supporters said bitcoin should be used to pay for collectible sneakers.
Last month, Trump told people at the Libertarian National Convention that he would commute Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence. Ulbricht was found guilty of owning and running Silk Road, an illegal drug market on the dark web where people bought and sold drugs using bitcoin.
Trump’s change of mind about crypto comes after other signs that politicians see being against digital assets as bad for their careers.
Many people saw the fact that a lot of House Democrats voted to pass a regulatory bill backed by the tech industry last month as a sign that they don’t want voters to think their party is against crypto.
Dave Weigel, a political reporter for Semafor, said that Trump’s change of heart was similar to when he gave up on the idea that the federal government should ban TikTok because it has ties to the Chinese government.
“The fact that Trump changed his mind about crypto and TikTok and found only good things about it really shows why he’s such a strong candidate,” Weigel wrote Thursday on X.
