What Are U.S. Presidential Hopefuls Saying About Crypto?

Crypto is becoming a talking point for some presidential hopefuls in the 2024 US election. The question is how much of a talking point joining us now to discuss that and more is Coin Desk's global policy and regulation. Managing editor Nick, who is also the editor of Coin De State of crypto newsletter. Good morning, Nick. Good morning. So how important is crypto as a topic in the upcoming presidential debates and elections? It's not, we, we we can end this here. Move on. Um This is, yeah, no, it, you know, this is a, this is an issue where you've seen some candidates talk about it. You know, Governor Ron de Santa of Florida, Ramaswami, the, you know, biotech entrepreneur, but it's not really an election issue, right? This is just something that, you know, some of these uh candidates for high office have touched on alluded to maybe made a show of doing something about, but it's not come up at the debate for the, you know, Republican primary last week. It's not come up as a talking point on the actual campaign trail. Um You know, we have the sitting uh you know, ranking member, the senior most Republican of the Senate banking committee. Uh and he hasn't mentioned crypto at all. So II I, it's really not at this point, a particularly important issue for, you know, anyone on the stage it would appear and what's more even a lot of the kind of crypto adjacent issues that we saw being discussed in 2020 in the prelude to the 2020 election. Uh you know, things like, you know, just internet access section 2 30 publishers, right? We're not even seeing those come up really uh in the run up to the 2024 election yet, who are the most crypto friendly candidates? Nick. Um I mean, are we looking at their statements or are we looking at what they've actually done? I guess the two are quite different, aren't they? Yeah, you know, if you go by statements, uh you know, as I mentioned, Mr Ramaswami is very pro Bitcoin. Uh Governor desantis has, you know, said some stuff about Bitcoin in particular. Uh He's also, you know, signed a bill that he said would ban central bank digital currencies, although, you know, it's unlikely it would actually do that. Um We've got a couple of other candidates that have mentioned it or, you know, kind of alluded to it. What's interesting is, um you know, former President Donald Trump, of course, you know, famously said he was not a fan of Bitcoin came after Libra back when that was uh a project people were working on. Um has said, you know, even since leaving office that he does not like crypto, but also appears to hold quite a, you know, a sizable amount of ether for, you know, anyone really, um, as well as, you know, he's issued his own line of uh NFTS and has generated a fair amount of income from that as well. Nick, is there a world in which the election is so close, the presidential election is so close that it's crypto voters that become the, you know, difference in who wins or not. It seems unlikely to me at this stage. Um Obviously, we are looking at what appears to be a close election so far, but, you know, all of the major issues that seem to be defining this selection. Um you know, some of them are ones we've seen for, for example, 2022 election issues like, uh you know, abortion access, um you know, the economy, they're not really playing in the same way. Uh or sorry, crypto is not really paying uh playing in the same way as, you know, these other issues have been so far. So, you know, my guess is the 2024 election, we're more likely to see some of these same issues as 2022 come up again rather than uh you know, crypto specifically, um or even, you know, crypto adjacent issues like I mentioned before. All right, Nick Thank you for joining the show this morning and chatting about the elections. Thank you. That was Coindesk global policy and regulation. Managing editor Nick Day. Don't forget to sign up for the state of crypto newsletter on coindesk dot com.