Over the past week, Kamala Harris has made it known that she plans on hitting the “reset” button when it comes to the cryptocurrency industry. Currently, there’s bad blood between crypto stans and the Biden-Harris White House, due to a perception that the administration has unfairly targeted their industry. Now, Harris, who has become the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, is looking to thaw relations.
Per the Financial Times, members of Harris’ team “have approached top crypto companies” in recent days, including Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and the stablecoin firm Circle. The plan would seem to be to gin up support in the tech sector, as Harris makes her bid for the White House. Harris also apparently reached out to billionaire Mark Cuban to ask for input on “crypto policy.” But Harris may have a steep hill to climb, as her opponent, Donald Trump, already seems to be the de facto favorite of the web3 community.
At a Bitcoin conference last week, Trump drew cheers as he rambled about how great he was going to make crypto. “If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA,” Trump said, demonstrating a less-than-stellar grasp over the concepts he was babbling about. Trump made additional promises, including that, if elected, he would fire the current head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler (who has been labeled a threat due to his regulatory actions against crypto firms), and commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road, the darknet drug market.
Trump is backed by some of the heaviest hitters in the crypto industry, most notably the not-Facebook-founders Winklevoss twins. Both brothers have been extremely vocal about their disdain for the Biden-Harris administration, as well as their support for Trump. Last week, in a melodramatic post on X, Tyler Winklevoss accused the Biden-Harris administration of demonstrating an “unwillingness to sincerely engage with our industry beyond paying lip service,” and characterized rich crypto moguls like himself as victims of the government.
“Over the past few years, the Biden Administration has openly declared war against crypto,” Winklevoss ranted, in one post. “It has weaponized multiple government agencies to bully, harass, and sue the good actors in our industry in an effort to destroy it. This Administration’s actions have been nothing short of an unprecedented abuse of power wielded entirely for twisted political gain at the complete expense of innovation, the American taxpayer, and the American economy,” the billionaire whined.
Harris’s failure to show up to the crypto conference where Trump appeared was also seen as an unforgivable offense. “She can’t even take the first step and show up to start mending fences,” Winklevoss said, in another post. “Our industry won’t forget this. We will show no mercy in November.”
There are obviously a lot of negative things you can say about Tyler Winklevoss, though the feat of making moderate regulatory scrutiny (which the crypto industry, beset as it is by endless scams and scandals, desperately needs) seem like an equivalent to some sort of civil rights struggle is actually quite impressive. Good job, Tyler.
Of course, one reason Winklevoss might be so triggered by the specter of government oversight is that, over the past few years, his company has been the subject of regulatory action multiple times. Last January, the SEC charged Gemini and its business partner, Genesis, with providing unregistered securities to investors through a program that touted a very high interest on deposits. The two companies were then sued by New York Attorney General Leticia James, who accused them of defrauding hundreds of thousands of customers.
Presumably, in the minds of the Winklevosses, these government actions were examples of persecution, not merely the result of regulatory agencies doing their jobs and protecting consumers from predatory corporate practices.
After the Harris campaign made it known they wanted to “reset” relations with crypto, the Winklevosses dropped into the chat again, though their tone hadn’t changed much. Cameron Winklevoss posted: “Beware of the Big Bluff. Harris and her advisors are in the process of working on a “reset” with the crypto industry. Being respectful of the Vice President’s time, let’s be crystal clear here: @KamalaHarris, please don’t bother unless you are prepared to take swift, bold, and concrete action. You can’t burn bridges for 4 years and expect to rebuild them with words alone.”
It’s worth wondering how much Harris can really hope to get out of people like this. In June, the Winklevosses had already announced they had donated $1 million in Bitcoin to Trump’s re-election effort and would be voting for him in November. Similarly, it’s worth asking what Harris can really hope to gain by buddying up to an industry that, despite much mystification, is little more than a less-regulated mutation of the already notably deregulated and depraved financial industry. Critics have sought to dissuade Harris from pandering to what is little more than a globally-scaled scam populated by fraudsters and criminals.
Still, by offering an olive branch to an industry that is all but in the bag for her opponent, Harris may be hoping to use the crypto issue to signal a broader open-mindedness to other parts of the tech industry, the likes of which are currently engaged in a low-frequency civil war centered around the election. As people like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk openly proclaim their support for Donald Trump, Harris is likely looking to salvage relations with Silicon Valley moguls who haven’t yet been red-pilled.
Unfortunately, to do that, she’ll have to at least seem amenable to their business interests, which may not be great for the rest of us. Even ostensibly moderate political personalities, like billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, are attempting to translate their influence in the high-stakes election into favors that can be cashed in after November (Hoffman recently asked Harris to fire Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who has investigated several companies that Hoffman has interests in).
