by Ali Tucker at Badlands Media
President Trump’s upcoming meeting with wealthy donors at a Bitcoin conference this weekend underscores the rising influence of the digital-asset sector in the current political campaign cycle. According to OpenSecrets, industry donors have already contributed more to the 2024 election than in all previous cycles combined, even excluding second-quarter donations.
In recent months, Trump has engaged with various crypto stakeholders, including NFT collectors and Bitcoin miners, and has promised support for U.S. mining efforts. He will host a private fundraising event in Nashville on July 27, with entry priced at $844,600 for a round table seat, and will speak at the conference the same day. Meanwhile, presumed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris declined to attend, according to organizers.
Prominent figures like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz have pledged support to Trump, with Andreessen calling it a “flat out endorsement of the entire crypto space” after reviewing the Republican platform, which Trump purportedly wrote himself. Andreessen and Horowitz noted their inability to schedule a meeting with Biden, contrasting with their access to Trump.
In the 2022 cycle, crypto exchange operators and major venture capital backers donated $88 million, Bloomberg found in an analysis of Federal Election Commission records. This figure includes funds later returned from FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and colleagues.
The fallout from FTX initially caused politicians to distance themselves from crypto. However,…
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