By Hermine Wong
Let’s say the quiet part out loud: the crypto-native don’t want to see Trump as the face of this community. He and his family are promoting the same kind of rug-pull projects that the crypto community has spent years battling. So why did young men vote for him? Because even with the grifting, he isn’t completely ignoring them or, worse, pretending they’re something they’re not.
Go to any crypto meetup or conference and you’ll know that the builders aren’t about hype tokens or centralized projects propped up only by endorsements. Crypto is about giving people control of their money, their data, and their digital identity. The ethos is grounded in the earned distrust of centralized institutions: Wall Street, Big Tech, and the federal government (most recently proven by the speed of DOGE’s access to all of our data).
The community’s oft-quoted mantras prove the point:
“Don’t trust. Verify.”
“Not your keys, not your coins.”
“If you don’t know where the yield comes from, you are the yield.”
These are not the vibes of blind allegiance. The crypto community was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, when banks collapsed under their own misconduct and taxpayers footed the bill. Embedded within Bitcoin’s genesis block is the hardcoded reminder: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
The Democrats’ insistence of conflating that community with Trump’s opportunism is lazy. The obvious consequence has been to push away the very voters they desperately need.
Sure, some politicians may be a little scared of the campaign money involved: Crypto PACs have raised over $260 million, making crypto the sixth largest Super PAC, dwarfing any other industry-supported Super PAC (all the others are related to a particular party or candidate). But those donations came from just 50 individuals. That’s not a movement. It’s a small elevator lobby.
Meanwhile, there’s a whole voter base of millions of young men who turned to crypto because of their mistrust of Wall Street and Big Tech. The same mistrust Democrats share of those same centralized entities. Democrats don’t have to embrace hype coins or endorse bad legislation. In fact, they shouldn’t. But they do need to actually learn to embrace the core values of the builders in the crypto community: individual digital ownership and decentralization.
Democrats also need to start demonstrating this now. They can’t risk another cycle without bringing young men back under the tent. One cycle can be a blip, but two cycles in a row becomes a habit, and habits are hard to break.
The GENIUS Act is actually the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to show that they’re a party who is more interested in voters than soundbites against Trump. The current draft is 57 pages of legislative jargon to elevate the roles of centralized entities in overseeing stablecoins. No surprise. Remember those 50 individuals who raised $260 million for the crypto Super PAC? They’ll definitely benefit from an increased reliance on their intermediation.
But embedded in the draft legislation is a small definition that is doing a lot of work, and that’s the definition of “distributed ledger.” Instead of hating on Trump, the Democrats could band together to say that the definition doesn’t require decentralization or network security, and until that happens, they can’t advance a stablecoin bill that only promotes fee-taking central intermediaries. Now that could be the beginning of a real sea-change.
