Taha Hassib (Abu Dhabi)
In a radical change from his previous stance on cryptocurrencies, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has announced his intention to launch a cryptocurrency platform, viewing it as an alternative to banks and major financial institutions, after taking a hostile stance towards them during his presidency. However, the Republican candidate is now presenting himself as a pioneer in this field, promising to transform the United States into a “Bitcoin superpower.” Through his financial disclosure form, the Republican presidential candidate revealed that he owns more than a million dollars in cryptocurrencies.
Trump began promoting the Trump Organization’s soon-to-launch cryptocurrency platform, The DeFiant Ones, to his 7.5 million followers on Truth Social on Aug. 22. Two of Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Jr., have spent weeks promoting the platform, which Eric has described as “digital real estate.” The platform Trump has promised is based on decentralized finance, which eliminates the need for a middleman like a traditional bank to process transactions with a third party, and relies on blockchain technology, which maintains a record of transactions that is theoretically inviolable and accessible to all.
In May, Trump became the first presidential candidate to accept cryptocurrency donations. In July, the Republican presidential candidate headlined the largest cryptocurrency conference, Bitcoin 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee. “I’m proud to be the first American president to speak at a Bitcoin conference,” Trump said. Since his support for the cryptocurrency sector, Trump has raised $25 million in donations from the sector by the end of July.
During the Bitcoin 2024 conference, Trump promised that if re-elected, he would be “the pro-Bitcoin president that the United States needs,” a position that contradicts the current Democratic administration’s view of regulating the cryptocurrency sector.
Former President Donald Trump made a series of promises during the conference, most notably: appointing a board of “people who love the industry” to set crypto regulations; firing SEC Chairman (and crypto skeptic) Gary Gensler, who blocked the Federal Reserve from creating its own digital currency; creating a strategic reserve of bitcoin; and commuting the prison sentence of Ross Ulbricht, who was convicted in 2015 of creating an illegal cryptocurrency marketplace.
Trump, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes at $4.5 billion, revealed that he received $7.2 million in an NFT licensing deal, while he also received at least $1 million, and up to $5 million, in “virtual Ethereum keys.”
“The world’s crypto assets are now worth more than $2 trillion,” says Paul Krugman, an American academic who won the Nobel Prize in Economics. This means that they need to be taken seriously. It has become clear that support for cryptocurrencies has entered the electoral arena. The Republican Party indicated in its 2024 platform that it will end what the party describes as the “Democrats’” illegal and “un-American” campaign against digital currencies, which means refusing to treat digital assets in the same way as traditional stocks and banks. Trump also promised to turn America into a “Bitcoin superpower,” which means the US government will buy a lot of Bitcoin.
The contrast between Harris and Trump’s positions was explained by Demyana Bakardzhieva, a senior researcher at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, who said that Trump did not begin to explicitly embrace the cryptocurrency industry until last May, while he had tweeted during his time in the White House that he was “not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and their value is very volatile and depends on the wind.”
“After the Republican presidential candidate sensed the opportunities to make fortunes from the cryptocurrency market and the possibility of attacking the Biden administration for its tough approach towards it, the new position is likely to gain him the support of young voters who deal in the Bitcoin markets,” Bakardzhieva explained in a statement to Al-Ittihad.
Bakardzhieva noted that cryptocurrency investors have not yet forgotten Trump’s previous positions in which he described cryptocurrencies as a “scam currency” and a “disaster waiting to happen.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has not expressed a clear anti-crypto sentiment, so Trump’s claims that she currently hates crypto are based solely on her association with the Biden administration, Bakardzhieva said. If she wants to salvage the outcome of the crypto debate, Harris needs to take a clear stance on her future policy strategy on crypto, which the Democratic-led advocacy group Crypto For Harris has promised will be progressive. According to Bakardzhieva, Trump is not the only one who has changed his mind on crypto, with some prominent Democrats recently signaling a more moderate approach to crypto regulation than President Biden.
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