- Biden 2020 campaign receives $5.22 million donation from crypto-derivatives exchange FTX.
- Biden pledges $300 billion for research and development and “breakthrough technologies”.
- Trump has had quite an acrimonious relationship with Bitcoin.
According to non-profit organisation OpenSecrets, bitcoin exchange FTX was one of the largest donors to the Biden 2020 election campaign.
Cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX made one of the largest donations to presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s campaign to enter the Whitehouse in the US election 2020. FTX made a $5.22 million donation, coming behind donors such as Google ($6.39 million) and the University of California ($6.38 million). The largest donor was Bloomberg ($57.5 million).
FTX’s intentions are unclear, but the donation – to the candidate that may very well be announced confirmed as the president-elect in the next few days – could give the crypto-business considerable influence at the top of the US government.
FTX is a relatively new crypto-exchange, founded by crypto-enthusiast Sam Bankman-Fried (CEO) in 2019. It specialises in offering crypto-derivatives.
Whilst the Biden 2020 campaign doesn’t have a set policy for cryptocurrency, it has pledged to invest $300 billion in research and development and “breakthrough technologies,” according to the campaign site.
Although not directly mentioning cryptocurrency, this could conceivably include, at the very least, systems that are based on decentralized ledger technologies or the Federal Reserve’s effort to keep pace with China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), digital yuan.
Trump, on the other hand, has had quite an acrimonious relationship with Bitcoin. In a series of tweets in 2019, he suggested bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were “not money” whose value is “based on thin air.” He even went after Facebook’s Libra, lambasting the company for thinking it could seek to effectively become a bank whilst avoiding banking regulations.
Therefore, it is not impossible to see why Biden 2020, not Trump, drew this sizeable donation from FTX. Whether it translates into influence on policy-making is yet to be seen. However, this could mark the beginning of a new wave of political engagement from a crypto-world that largely focuses on internal development. In a country with a notoriously slow, reluctant legal environment – it could definitely help speed things up.
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