As the Financial Times reported a few days ago, Kamala Harris has been trying to “reset” with crypto companies and their disciples, many of whom had defected (or never left) the Republican party. Joe Biden, and more particularly Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, and Gary Gensler, the SEC chair, have been super critical of crypto as basically one big speculative scam, while Donald Trump has in recent months changed tack and begun courting the crypto dudes for support (fellow Swamp correspondent Edward Luce has written a bit on that here.)
I would, of course, agree with the Democrats here, and wrote back in 2022 about how the meltdown of FTX exposed all the risks of crypto that were hiding in plain sight.
Sources close to the campaign tell me that for Harris, this is all about fundraising. And that’s fair enough — she needs to gather all the money and support she can during this multi-week honeymoon period. But I continue to think that Harris needs to walk a very careful line with Silicon Valley, given her close ties to tech (including a brother-in-law, former US attorney Tony West, who was chief counsel at Uber and is now a close adviser on the campaign).