Aisha Tukur
While Trump has been forthright about his views on crypto, Harris’ position is much less clear
The cryptocurrency industry is “rife with fraud and hucksters and grifters”, one of the United States’ top financial regulators has told the BBC.
The chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, says the “investing public around the globe has lost too much money” because of crypto companies not following the laws his agency tries to enforce.
It comes as the industry is spending millions of dollars on political donations, trying to influence the outcome of November’s US elections in the hope of more favourable future laws.
In addition to the presidential battle between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, all 435 districts in the House of Representatives are up for re-election, as well as 33 of the 100 seats in the Senate.
The future of cryptocurrency, one of the world’s most hotly-debated technologies, is an issue where there appears to be a clear dividing line between Donald Trump and the outgoing Biden administration.
Trump has been courting the votes of crypto enthusiasts by promising to make America “the crypto capital of the planet”, and creating a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” similar to the US government’s gold reserves.
Last week he launched a new crypto businesscalled World Liberty Financial, and although he provided few details, he said “I think crypto is one of those things we have to do”.
It’s a huge turnaround from three years ago, when he dismissed Bitcoin as something that “seems like a scam” and a threat to the US dollar.
Trump’s new-found enthusiasm is a stark contrast to the Biden administration, of which Harris is the vice president. The White House has led a sweeping crackdown on crypto firms in recent years.
In March, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and boss of FTX was jailed for 25 years for fraud, after he stole billions of dollars from customers around the world, many of whom are still trying to recover their money.
Then in April, the founder of the world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao, got four months in prison, and the company paid a $4.3bn (£3.2bn) fine. He admitted to allowing criminals, child abusers and terrorists to launder money on his platform, in a case brought by the US Justice Department.
The SEC also has a case against Binance going through the courts. It is one of a record-high 46 enforcement actions the financial regulator took last year against firms trying to profit from what is still an emerging technology.
The jailing of crypto boss Sam Bankman-Fried highlighted the worst aspects of the crypto sector
“This is a field that has come along, and just because they’re recording their crypto assets on a new accounting ledger, they [wrongly] say ‘we don’t think we want to comply with the time-tested laws’,” says Mr Gensler.
He explains that rules that force companies that want to raise money from the public to “share certain information” with them have been in place to protect investors since the SEC was created.
This was back in 1934, in the aftermath of the infamous Wall Street crash of 1929 that heralded the Great Depression.
“Crypto is just a small piece of the US and worldwide capital markets, but it can undermine trust that everyday investors have in the capital markets,” says Mr Gensler.
Whilst fans argue that crypto offers a fast, cheap and secure way to move funds, a survey by the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, found that the number of Americans using it has dropped from 12% in 2021 to 7% last year.
