If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the U.S. presidency in November, her administration could be less hostile toward crypto than President Joe Biden's has been, says TD Cowen, but the comparison to a potential second Donald Trump presidency is more challenging.
Vice President Harris, who is set to accept her party's presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago, has been rising in the polls since she entered the race . This has made much of the crypto industry feel ill at ease given the anti-crypto crusade in recent years led by Biden-appointed U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Harris has not publicly expressed a view on the crypto industry.
Meanwhile, former President Trump swiftly changed his tune on bitcoin this summer and has embraced the community as a voting bloc, agreeing to appear at one of the industry's largest conferences in Nashville and adding it as a priority in his Republican Party Platform . "We view Kamala Harris as more open to crypto and digital assets than Joe Biden, though we do not view this as a priority and believe the industry could continue to face hostile regulators," TD Cowen's Jaret Seiberg wrote in a note Thursday. "Trump in recent months has reinvented himself as a crypto advocate as he courts the industry.
Yet history tells us that this does not guarantee that Trump's regulators in the second term will be more accommodating to crypto than during hi.