The Harris campaign claims it will back the crypto community despite the Democratic Party failing to announce a web3 policy platform.
During an Aug. 21 panel hosted by Bloomberg News, Brian Nelson, a senior campaign advisor to the Democratic Party presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, said that Harris will champion policies supporting the growth of digital assets if elected President.
Responding to questions concerning the campaign’s position on crypto, Nelson vouched that a Harris administration would support web3 innovation.
“She’s going to support policies that ensure that emerging technologies and that sort of industry can continue to grow,” Nelson said.
Nelson emphasized that the administration would provide regulatory clarity to the web3 industry — departing from the uncertainty and ambiguity that has plagued the sector throughout Biden’s presidency amid the reign of Gary Gensler at the head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
“They’ve expressed that one of the things that they need are stable rules, rules of the road,” Nelson added.
Nelson serves as the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.
In May, Nelson described unregulated stablecoins as a threat to national security. Nelson also oversaw the department’s first risk report on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), suggesting a hawkish position on web3.
Uncertainty shrouds Harris’ crypto policy
Nelson’s comments come as the crypto community anxiously awaits formal web3 policy from the Harris campaign.
The celebrity investor Mark Cuban and SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci recently sought to present Harris as friendlier to Web3 than the Biden administration following her ascension to the top of the Democratic Party ticket.
“It’s obvious that Kamala is going in-depth into not just crypto in general, but web3 and what it is capable of,” Cuban told The Defiant. “I expect her to be a huge positive for the industry.”
However, crypto policy was conspicuously absent from the Democratic Party’s recently announced 2024 policy platform.
On Aug. 8, Democratic Party officials also held a Zoom meeting with cryptocurrency executives and industry representatives. However, the discussion reportedly went poorly, with crypto industry executives taking exemption with the hostile regulatory climate overseen by the Biden administration.
However, Harris also onboarded David Plouffe, a former member of the Binance Global Advisory Board and former advisor to President Barack Obama, to her campaign staff.
Trump courts crypto votes
By contrast, Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has actively sought to court the crypto community since May, comprising a notable pivot from when he described Bitcoin as a “scam” in 2021.
Trump has since begun campaign donations in the form of crypto, hosted a meeting with Bitcoin mining executives, and delivered a keynote speech at the recent Bitcoin2024 conference. During the speech, Trump pledged to fire Gensler, to never sell the U.S. government’s BTC holdings, and to establish the United States as the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Recent filings show Trump holds between $1 million and $5 million worth of Ethereum (ETH). Trump earned $7.15 million through a licensing deal with NFT INT — the company behind the Trump Digital Trading Cards collections.
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