Capital Economy, Business and Finance
Donald Trump used to condemn cryptocurrency as a “scam against the dollar”. That has swiftly given way to full-throated approval, after he raised more $25 million in bitcoin donations for his presidential campaign. At an event on Saturday, Trump drew applause from crypto bros after announcing plans for a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” and the sacking of Gary Gensler, chair of the SEC, in favour of a more pro-crypto watchdog. He also vowed to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbrict, who is serving a life term in prison for creating the Silk Road, a crypto-trading online black market. The trade-offs seem logical: crypto’s largely male user-base forms a neat venn diagram with the voters Trump is targeting. It also has the support of powerful financiers such as Marc Andreessen, who has raised $8 billion to target the sector through his firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Elon Musk, the exponent of Dogecoin. But according to Bloomberg, Trump’s slow conversion to the world of crypto has its roots in something more puerile: a collection of 200,000 baseball-card-style NFTs depicting him as “America’s Superhero” – all individually signed off after hours of consideration by the former president.
