Former president Donald Trump continues to bill himself as the crypto-friendly candidate in a bid to secure donations from the digital asset sector.
Trevor Traina, a tech executive, tells Reuters that Trump said “he would be the crypto president” at a recent San Francisco fundraiser.
Traina previously served as the US ambassador to Austria during the Trump Administration.
The former president has previously expressed hostility towards the digital asset sector. In May 2018, while serving in the Oval Office, he reportedly directed then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to “go after Bitcoin [for fraud].”
Three years later, Trump said in an interview that he owned zero cryptocurrencies, arguing that digital assets were “a disaster waiting to happen.”
The former president, however, has spent the past couple of years warming up to the sector in a bid to differentiate himself from the Biden Administration, which some crypto stakeholders view as hostile towards digital assets.
In December 2022, Trump launched a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum (ETH)-based platform OpenSea, weeks after formally announcing his intention to run for the 2024 presidential election.
A financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics last year indicated the former president owned a cryptocurrency wallet with holdings valued somewhere between $250,001 and $500,000.
And last month, Trump declared to a group of supporters who bought his NFTs that he’s “fine” with digital assets. A few weeks later, his campaign announced it would accept crypto donations for the 2024 election.
Trump has since been convicted of 34 felonies by a jury of 12 New Yorkers.
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