“We will encourage innovative technologies like A.I. and digital assets, while protecting our consumers and investors,” Vice President Kamala Harris told donors gathered at New York City’s Cipriani Wall Street, a virtual clubhouse for the titans of high finance this week.
That latter description — “digital assets” — probably doesn’t mean NFTs featuring former President Donald Trump in superhero garb, though technically those non-fungible tokens meet the “digital asset” definition.
What Harris is signaling more acutely with the deliberately vague term “digital assets” is a general openness, in a future Harris administration, to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and the larger crypto industry.
BREAKING — @VP Harris has taken note of the almost 1.5 million @StandWithCrypto advocates and 52 million crypto owners nationwide who are ready to support candidates who are pro-crypto.
Proud of our advocates and all the work they have done to get candidates at every level to… https://t.co/m6XSjnJuvB
— Stand With Crypto (@standwithcrypto) September 22, 2024
Trump, a former crypto skeptic, has embraced the sector especially as the “crypto bro” demographic — notably libertarian-leaning — has become increasingly important to his re-election chances.
With her openness, Harris is working to douse suspicion that a Harris administration would attempt to smother the loosely regulated sector with too much oversight.
Protecting consumers, as she promises, can be accomplished without those protections strangling innovation, her statement asserts. The fundraiser took in $27 million, signaling that the Vice President’s message was well-received.
[Note: In July Reuters reported on the notion that — accurate or not — a lingering anti-crypto perception around Democrats could be a liability in the election, and that the group “Crypto4Harris is part of a growing effort by Democrats and others in the crypto industry to push nonpartisanship rather than hitch their wagon to Republican nominee Donald Trump.”]
Harris also has the support of billionaire crypto enthusiast Mark Cuban, who has hinted he would be interested in running the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory body with crypto in its sights, in a Harris administration.