Crypto
Sen. Schumer speaks at the Crypto4Harris event
A screenshot of Sen. Schumer speaking at the Crypto4Harris event

Sen. Schumer vows to pass crypto legislation in 2024 as the industry courts VP Harris

The Crypto4Harris event argued Democrats were crypto’s best bet.

The crypto industry wants to make one thing clear: it’s not all in on former President Donald Trump. 

A collection of crypto insiders and elected officials gathered Wednesday evening to stage a forceful rejoinder to the growing narrative that the digital asset industry is fully in the Republican party’s camp ahead of this year’s US presidential election. Organizers said the streamed event, dubbed the “Crypto4Harris Town Hall,” was the result of a “grass roots” effort that came together organically. 

In doing, they managed to grab the attention of those — like Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — who very well may help decide the industry’s fate in the US.

“And why are we here today?” Schumer asked in an attempt to clarify the stakes. “Because we all support Vice President Kamala Harris to be our next president, and we all believe in the future of crypto.”

Schumer went on to argue that pro-crypto legislation is key to innovation in the US. And in a moment seemingly designed to make headlines, he said that he is committed to getting something passed out of the Senate and signed into law by the end of this year. 

“Crypto is here to stay no matter what,” said the senator. “So Congress must get it right.”

“There’s only one candidate running for president who’s called crypto a ‘scam,’ and that’s Donald Trump.”

Others on the call went after Trump directly, in what could be viewed as an attempt to woo the crypto constituency that had dialed into the town hall. 

“There’s only one candidate running for president who’s called crypto a ‘scam,’ and that’s Donald Trump,” said North Carolina Congressman Wiley Nickel, referring to Trump’s opinion on bitcoin before a recent 180. “Donald Trump is just totally full of shit.”

The multiple Democratic Representatives and Senators on the call were joined by pro-crypto businesspeople, all making the same case: Harris is better suited to advance the industry in the US than Trump, and Republicans aren’t crypto’s best bet.

“Republicans couldn’t care less, they just want to see the bitcoin maxis get richer.”

Justin Slaughter, the VP of regulatory affairs at the crypto-investment company Paradigm, made the industry’s case for Harris. “I continue to believe that crypto represents Democratic and progressive values,” said Slaughter. “We’re long overdue for a reset,” he added, arguing that Harris is well positioned to move past what the industry views as the Biden Admin’s anti-crypto stance. 

“Supporting crypto is not about supporting the bags of elite bitcoin maxis,” said Mark Cuban, using a slang term to derisively refer to folks who argue that the original cryptocurrency will win out to the exclusion of all others. “Republicans couldn’t care less, they just want to see the bitcoin maxis get richer.”

If the goal of Wednesday’s town hall was to convince single-issue crypto voters and industry insiders that Democrats generally and Harris specifically are a better option than their Republican counterparts, then the Crypto4Harris organizers have their work cut out for them. 

Last month, the Republican party added supporting crypto to its official party platform. 

Still, Crypto4Harris’ message likely didn’t fall on deaf ears. Yesterday, before the town hall kicked off, NBC News reported that the pro-crypto PAC Fairshake planned to spend $3 million in support of two Democratic Senate candidates this fall.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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