Crypto News: Presidential laser eyes

In this issue of the Bloomberg Crypto newsletter, Michael P. Regan takes a look at the laser eyes on the campaign trail.

The beauty contests for next year's US presidential election are starting to heat up, which means so is the political rhetoric regarding cryptocurrencies. Yet unlike so many other big, polarizing topics in the US, opinions on crypto remain tough to pigeonhole entirely along party lines.

Regulators during President Joe Biden's term obviously have not taken a friendly stance toward the industry by pursuing a variety of enforcement actions against digital-asset exchanges, executives and hucksters. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, is staking out the opposing ground by promising at the Family Leadership Summit to end "Biden's war on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency," as well as any future Federal Reserve effort to reappropriate blockchain technology in the form of a central bank digital currency, if he is elected president.

However, while the top-polling Republican, former President Donald Trump, had a more hands-off approach than Biden's while he was in office, he is on the record saying he's "not a fan" of crypto and telling Fox Business in 2021 that Bitcoin "seems like a scam." Of course, he was willing to accept crypto as payment for his non-fungible token collection featuring cartoon images of him in flattering poses.

Via collecttrumpcards.com

Further down the polling leaderboard among the more long-shot candidates, Republican Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has made turning his city into a "crypto capital of the world" a main ambition – complete with all the baggage that comes along with that. (After all, he was credited with convincing alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried to buy the naming rights for the former FTX Arena.)

Yet on the Democrat side, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s stance is perhaps the most extreme of all so far: He wants the US to start buying Bitcoin and other assets to underpin the value of the dollar, a notion that Newsweek says was swiftly "trashed" by experts.

Politicians love polls, and some may shed light on why the political lines are so blurry when it comes to digital assets: A survey last year by the Crypto Council for Innovation actually found that slightly more Democrats own crypto than Republicans - 13% versus 10% - while 17% of independents said they were hodlers. None of those numbers scream that defending crypto is necessarily a "red meat for the base" - type of issue in a political campaign.

There's another poll that candidates may want to consult before adding laser eyes to their official campaign headshot: A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March found that 75% of Americans who have heard of cryptocurrencies are not confident in their safety or reliability.

555

The number of carats in the black diamond known as "The Enigma" which was allegedly illegally purchased by the creator of the Hex crypto token using

investor funds, according to the SEC.

"The court declines to draw a distinction between these coins based on their manner of sale, such that coins sold directly to institutional investors are considered securities and those sold through secondary market transactions to retail investors are not."

Jed Rakoff

Senior US District Judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York

Rakoff split with another US judge who earlier this month ruled that a Ripple Labs token was not a security when sold to the public on secondary markets, adding to uncertainty over cryptocurrency regulation.

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