Over the year, the roles that crypto plays in everyday lives have become more prominent, more so with the last bull market. Given this, it is natural that the space, currently worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is spilling into other aspects such as politics. And now, as the US elections draw closer, crypto and the people who participate in the sector are playing a more important role.
Crypto Giants Touching Politics
Over the last few years, there has been more dabbling by important people in the crypto space in the world of politics. The most important of these have been FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) who has been pouring millions into political candidates across the board.
In data released by Open Secrets, a platform that follows the donations to different political campaigns, SBF has risen quickly across the ranks and is now the 6th largest contributor to federal campaigns. Apparently, the FTX CEO has donated approximately $40 million to both democratic and republican candidates. However, it skews heavily in favor of the democrats whom $36.7 million of SBF’s contributions have gone.
SBF also recently stated that he was actually a significant donor in the Democratic and Republican primaries. According to him, he favors the dawn of a “bipartisan climate” which is why he has donated to the campaigns of both democratic and republican candidates.
The FTX CEO made his billions from crypto and looks to be funneling a significant amount to politics, and he is not the only one as FTX co-CEO Ryan Salame is also donating millions of dollars to political campaigns. Although, unlike SBF, Salame’s donations have gone to mainly Republican candidates.
This increased involvement of crypto billionaires in politics will obviously see crypto feature more as time goes on. It also shows a progression in the amount being donated by those in crypto towards political campaigns given that SBF had donated $5.2 million to the Joe Biden presidential campaign in 2020, and his donation figures now sit close to $40 million in the last year. The CEO had also previously stated that he planned to spend up to $1 billion to back whoever was running against Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign.
In the end, SBF’s donations seem to be going towards furthering the space in the eyes of these politicians. In his Nov. 5 tweet, he explained that he was working with the candidates to support permissionless finance. Also using the FTX platform to facilitate crypto donations for some of these politicians.
Crypto donations to political campaigns are becoming increasingly popular and legal in some places. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has previously given the green light to political committees to accept donations in bitcoin, while the states of Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, and Tennessee have said that crypto campaign donations are now permitted.
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