Topline
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) vowed Monday to end the Biden Administration’s so-called war on crypto investors should he win the GOP presidential nomination and ultimately end up in the White House, as DeSantis again jockeys toward crypto evangelists with a misleading declaration.
Key Facts
“Biden’s war on bitcoin and cryptocurrency will come to an end when I am president,” DeSantis said at a Monday campaign event in New Hampshire detailing his economic policy.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has indeed cracked down on a variety of crypto assets during Biden’s presidency, deeming several tokens to be unregistered securities and suing large exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase for allowing trades of these assets on their platforms.
But it’s unclear exactly what DeSantis is referring to with bitcoin, the world’s largest digital asset with a roughly $570 billion market capitalization, considering Biden-selected SEC chair Gary Gensler has stated bitcoin is a commodity, not a security, and thus won’t be regulated like other securities such as stocks and bonds.
“We are going to allow Americans to invest in things like bitcoin and cryptocurrency,” DeSantis added, explaining that “no one’s forcing” investors to put their money into the asset class, a possible nod to the SEC’s various actions against influencers who promoted fraudulent digital assets.
Key Background
In a May interview with the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, DeSantis pontificated that the Biden Administration “clearly has it out for bitcoin” and will “probably end up killing” the token if Biden wins reelection (again, it’s unclear what bitcoin action the Florida politician is referring to). Gensler is a skeptic of the crypto space broadly, saying last month the current industry landscape is “reminiscent of what we had in the 1920s before the federal securities laws were put in place” and filled with “hucksters, fraudsters, scam artists and ponzi schemes.” Biden himself has largely been mum about crypto, and specifically bitcoin, but one of his rare actions was signing an executive order last March broadly outlining regulation for the sector and backing the idea of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), a Federal Reserve-issued digital asset. Earlier this year, DeSantis signed a bill to outlaw CBDCs in Florida, claiming the “Big Brother” coin would stifle economic freedom and financial technology innovation.
Tangent
DeSantis has positioned himself as the most crypto-friendly option in a deep field for the GOP’s 2024 nomination. Former President Donald Trump, the odds-on favorite, said in 2019 he’s “not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies,” adding “unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” Trump has not appeared to soften on his anti-bitcoin stance, but did recently peddle a line of $99 non-fungible tokens bearing his image.
Big Number
About 120%. That’s how much bitcoin is up since Biden was elected president in November 2020.
Further Reading
Former DeSantis PAC Leader Trashes ‘Very Flawed’ DeSantis As His Campaign Spirals (Forbes)
Guns, Gains And God: Four Days In Miami With Crypto’s Most Faithful Fans (Forbes)
Ron DeSantis Posturing On Bitcoin Is Just Performative Politics (Blockworks)
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