nashville
CNN
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For once, Donald Trump would have made for an unexpected headliner at the cryptocurrency confab.
As president, Trump declared bitcoin “not money” and criticized it, saying it was “highly volatile and volatile.” He warned that crypto assets help fuel illegal underground markets.
“We have only ONE real currency in the USA, and it’s stronger than ever,” Trump tweeted in 2019. “It’s called the United States Dollar!”
But on Saturday, Trump addressed arriving at the cryptocurrency industry’s biggest annual gathering in Nashville not as a skeptic but as one of its most well-known proponents — the culmination of a Complete reversal on this issue during the former president’s latest bid for the White House.
Despite cryptocurrencies’ troubled recent history and his own past reservations, Trump has fully embraced the hype and expectations of the nascent industry. His campaign now accepts bitcoin donations — and has collected about $4 million, a source with knowledge of his fundraising said. He has attacked the Biden administration’s efforts to regulate the industry as a “war on crypto” without acknowledging the massive fraud schemes that have shattered public confidence in digital currencies. And he has vowed to make it easier for cryptocurrency mining companies to operate in the United States as president.
“Otherwise, other countries will have this problem, too,” Trump said in Wisconsin earlier this month.
In turn, the industry has embraced Trump. Its leaders and investors have donated millions of dollars to his campaign and aligned political committees. They are cheerleaders for his candidacy to their large online audiences and on Saturday provided him a platform to speak directly to the estimated 20,000 attendees at this year’s Bitcoin Conference.
“A lot of these people think of themselves as single-issue voters,” said tech writer Jacob Silverman, author of the best-selling book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.” “If Trump or somebody else says they’re a supporter of bitcoin, that matters to them.”
Trump made a number of cryptocurrency-friendly policy commitments on Saturday, including pledging to remove Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler and create a “strategic national bitcoin reserve,” which are part of his campaign promise to encourage growth of the industry in the US.
“If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, produced and manufactured in the USA,” Trump said at the conference, ahead of a more traditional campaign event scheduled for later in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Since Trump voiced his opposition to bitcoin in 2019, the volatile industry has only faced more turmoil, particularly in the wake of arrests, trials, and Imprisonment of Sam Bankman-FriedFounder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried, once the face of a company that counted comedian Larry David and superstar quarterback Tom Brady among its celebrity endorsers, was sentenced in March to 25 years in prison for running a billion-dollar fraud scheme through his companies.
Trump’s campaign has not explained what prompted the former president’s 180-degree shift on bitcoin. Nor has Trump addressed one of the main criticisms of digital currencies: for it lacking practical, real-world uses and for it being a highly speculative investment.
Trump campaign spokesman Bryan Hughes said in a statement to CNN that “crypto innovators and others in the technology sector are under attack from Democrats,” while the former president “stands ready to encourage American leadership in this and other emerging technologies.”
Republican allies have joined Trump in his tilt toward bitcoin. Speaking at the conference on Friday, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott argued that the former president understands attendees’ concerns about financial freedom — a common refrain in the crypto community.
“We want people, whether they love their dollars or their digital assets, we want them to be responsible for making their own decisions,” Scott said.
David Bailey, CEO of bitcoin-focused media company BTC Inc., said in a recent interview that industry leaders have been working for months to help Trump and educate his campaign about his policy agenda and the opportunity to influence voters on the topic.
Bailey acknowledged that their conversations included the “amount of support that cryptocurrency adoption is getting from the industry.” Their conversations also included a meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida earlier this year.
“Everything really escalated at that point,” said Bailey, whose company hosts the annual conference where Trump spoke Saturday.
Indeed, support for Trump began pouring in soon after. Billionaire crypto tycoons Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss pledged to donate $1 million worth of bitcoin to Trump’s campaign. The Federal Election Commission has since 2014 allowed political committees to receive bitcoin as contributions, the value of which is determined by the price at the time the contribution is received.
Cryptocurrency was also a topic of discussion. Recent fundraising campaigns in Silicon Valley Trump’s new running mate, Ohio Senator. J.D. Vancehelped make the arrangements. Billionaire tech entrepreneur David Sacks, a major supporter of cryptocurrencies, hosted a fundraising event at his home.
“I think one of the things we heard at that dinner was that the difficulty that people in business are having under this Biden administration is that you have people in crypto who just want a framework. They want the government to tell them how to do things, and they’re not getting that,” Sachs said on a recent episode of the “All-In Podcast.”
Industry leaders and champions have become increasingly political, helping to finance super PACs that have overwhelmingly supported Republicans more than Democrats.
“It’s time for the crypto army to send a message to Washington,” Tyler Winklevoss wrote in an article. tall social media Post Supporting Trump, he said attacking us was political suicide.
Eric Soffer, a political consultant to major crypto companies, said that people committed to cryptocurrencies, who were pushed out of power after the Bankman-Fried affair, are “looking for political validation after being in the wilderness for years.”
“They believe their time has come, and it’s hard to resist a person who is telling them everything they want to hear,” Soffer said.
The cryptocurrency industry has since experienced a resurgence The Fall of FTXAfter a 2022 decline, bitcoin’s price has recovered and hit an all-time high in June. The excitement inside the Music City Center for this year’s Nashville event was palpable. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also addressed the conference on Friday.
Still, many Americans have expressed concerns about cryptocurrency, while more people are becoming aware of it. 2023 Pew Research survey It found that nearly 9 out of 10 adults had heard of cryptocurrency, and 75% of them did not believe it was safe or trustworthy.
But Trump’s wooing of crypto voters is in line with other efforts to find new support in unconventional places. Earlier this year, Trump approached members of the Libertarian Party at their annual convention, where he promised to “support the right of the country’s 50 million crypto holders to self-preservation.” There are plenty of similarities between the Libertarian and crypto communities.
It wasn’t hard to find Trump supporters inside the Bitcoin conference. John Fisher, 61, of Atlanta, has personally invested in cryptocurrencies since 2021. He voted for Trump in 2020 and plans to do so again.
Still, he was scathing of Trump’s efforts to placate convention attendees.
“Every politician has to be a supporter of something if they want votes,” Fisher said.
Luke Broyles, a 25-year-old from Michigan who works in the crypto industry, was also unsure about Trump’s latest requests despite his recent rhetoric.
“I think people are pretty skeptical about bitcoin,” Broyles said. “I think that’s fair. Ultimately, people are into bitcoin because they don’t trust politicians.”
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.
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