Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin on Wednesday cautioned against voting for political candidates based solely on whether they have adopted a “pro-crypto” stance.
“The game of politics is much more complicated than just ‘who wins the next election’, and there are a lot of levers that your words and actions affect,” Buterin wrote in a blog post that warned even Putin and the Russian government had “expressed willingness to become ‘open to crypto.'”
Buterin’s post comes as Donald Trump, who has positioned himself as the pro-crypto candidate for president, rallies members of his party at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, and a day after venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz told employees of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that they plan to make significant donations to political action committees supporting Donald Trump’s campaign.
In an episode of “The Ben & Marc Show,” which features the a16z co-founders, Horowitz said that the Joe Biden administration, in the form of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has “fought” them every step of the way by “using very nefarious means.”
“They’ve sued I think over 30 of our companies,” added Horowitz. “They’re losing almost all these lawsuits, but the problem is that when you’re a startup you don’t have the money to fight the U.S. government and so they’re kind of nuking the industry in that way.”
Fairshake, a super PAC backed by crypto’s top companies, is now one of the top-spending PACs in this election cycle. Of the $160 million in total contributions it has raised, 94% can be traced back to just four companies: Ripple, Andreesen Horowitz, Coinbase and Jump Crypto.
“There is a particular style of being ‘crypto-friendly’ that is common to authoritarian governments, that is worth being wary of. The best example of this is, predictably, modern Russia,” added Buterin, a Russia-born coder who built ethereum in his late teens.
Tesla chief Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, as well as crypto leaders like Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have also endorsed Trump.
In early June in San Francisco, technologists, crypto executives, and venture capitalists paid up to $300,000 per ticket to join a Trump fundraiser that ultimately raised more than $12 million.
“In particular, by publicly giving the impression that you support ‘pro-crypto’ candidates just because they are ‘pro-crypto’, you are helping to create an incentive gradient where politicians come to understand that all they need to get your support is to support ‘crypto,'” continued Buterin, who is known for periodically posting longer essays opining on existential threats to the ecosystem writ large.
Buterin did not single out any names in his post of either political candidates, or of those opting to support them.
Trump — who launched his latest non-fungible token collection on the solana blockchain in April — has been making increasingly bullish comments on crypto.
He is accepting digital currency donations and has pledged to defend the rights of those who choose to self-custody their coins, meaning that they don’t rely on a centralized entity like Coinbase to hold their tokens and instead, do it themselves in personal crypto wallets, which are sometimes outside the reach of the Internal Revenue Service. Trump also vowed at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington in May to keep Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and “her goons” away from bitcoin holders.
Meanwhile, following a meeting with bitcoiners at Mar-a-Lago with about a dozen mining executives who pledged cash and votes to him, Trump declared that all future bitcoin will be minted in the U.S., should he return to the White House.
On Monday, the Republican presidential nominee added Ohio Senator JD Vance to his ticket as vice president — a move viewed by many as a net win for the crypto sector. Vance has advocated for looser regulation of crypto and disclosed in 2022 that he personally holds bitcoin.
It comes in stark contrast to the Joe Biden White House, which has been seen as hard on crypto. Under President Biden, the SEC has dialed up actions on the sector, and even in the absence of hard-and-fast rules from Congress, the U.S. has proven to be one of the most active enforcers of penalties and legal enforcements against crypto companies.
The angrier the crypto industry got at the SEC for arresting and prosecuting them, the more people like Vance saw a chance to stake out a position on the opposite side of a crypto-skeptical Biden administration.
However, the perception that Biden is anti-crypto and Trump is pro-crypto has some Biden allies concerned enough to take their case directly to senior White House officials.
Trump is set to headline the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee on July 27.
