An unlikely alliance backing Donald Trump has emerged as a new political force in 2024: crypto libertarians and some vocal tech-world figures from Silicon Valley.
The union is helping to fill Trump’s campaign coffers and could become a central player in Washington next year if Republicans take control.
Trump will look to solidify this support Saturday as he prepares to speak at 3 p.m. ET to thousands attending Bitcoin 2024, a three-day conference in Nashville that is billed as the largest crypto gathering in the world.
Saturday’s speech is the culmination of Trump’s evolution on the issue. He kept his distance from crypto while in office, and in a 2021 Fox Business interview Trump opined that bitcoin “just seems like a scam.”
More recently, he began offering supportive words and consulting with those in the industry.
One of those meetings was with executives for Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based bitcoin miner Marathon Digital (MARA). They met Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., a month and a half ago to discuss lower taxes and even whether the US government should start buying bitcoin (BTC-USD).
“He has put a team around him that is educating him on this technology, and he’s also engaged directly with the industry,” Jayson Browder, senior vice president of government affairs for Marathon, told Yahoo Finance.
At the same time, some figures from Silicon Valley have been making it clear that they like Trump’s support for the crypto industry.
Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who run a firm that has invested in crypto, made this point in a podcast last week as they also discussed their disappointment with the approach of the Biden administration.
The White House, Horowitz said, has “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought enforcement actions against some of the industry’s biggest players, including Coinbase Global (COIN) and Robinhood (HOOD).
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban posted on X that some Silicon Valley support for Trump was a “bitcoin play” but “not because the former president is a far stronger proponent of crypto.”
Instead, he said, it’s because Trump’s policies of lower tax rates and tariffs “will drive the price” of bitcoin higher.
Higher tariffs open the possibility that in the White House Trump may seek to weaken the US dollar, a policy goal considered both controversial and difficult to achieve. But such a goal would present more reason for investors to seek out digital assets, bitcoin in particular, as a safe haven.
Source:- yahoo.finance
