JD Vance: Donald Trump\'s pro-crypto running mate has impeccable Silicon Valley connections

Much is known about JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, not least his past criticism of the Republican presidential candidate, his tough working class upbringing and his time in the US Marine Corps.

JD Vance, Donald Trump's running mate, is a former venture capitalist and US Marine who has been outspoken in his support for cryptocurrency and skepticism towards big tech companies.

Mr Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, has previously reported owning holdings of Bitcoin worth between $100,000 to $250,000 on the Coinbase platform.

He has also expressed support for crypto as a way of combatting government over-reach, highlighting how the Canadian finance minister had frozen the bank accounts of truckers protesting against COVID lockdowns.

"This is why crypto is taking off," Mr Vance tweeted in January. "The regime will cut off your access to banking if you have the wrong politics."

Mr Vance has also joined other Republican senators in writing to Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), to highlight an enforcement action against the crypto miner Debt Box in which, it was subsequently found, SEC lawyers had used false statements to justify freezing the company's assets.

He has also voted to reverse accounting guidelines introduced by the SEC that require publicly traded banks to place digital assets that they hold in custody on their balance sheets.

This rule change flies in the face of convention that bank custodial assets are held off-balance sheet and is expected to put up the cost of banks taking custody of crypto assets - and, in all probability, deterring them from doing so.

President Biden subsequently vetoed attempts to overturn the rule change.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Mr Vance worked for Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm co-founded and backed by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal.

Mr Thiel, one of the best-known figures in Silicon Valley, went on to back Mr Vance's run for the US Senate in 2020.

Mr Vance subsequently went to work for Revolution, a VC firm based in Washington DC, before launching his own VC firm, Narya Capital, in 2019.

The US news website Axios has reported that his backers in this included Mr Thiel and Marc Andreessen, another of Silicon Valley's best-known venture capitalists.

Axios said another backer of Narya Capital was Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google.

Another long-time supporter of Mr Vance is David Sacks, the former chief executive of the social networking service Yammer and an early-stage investor in successful tech businesses such as Facebook, Uber, Airbnb and Elon Musk's SpaceX, as well as Palantir Technologies, another well-known tech business co-founded by Mr Thiel.

Mr Vance has also, in the past, suggested the big tech companies have too much power and called for them to be broken up.

He has co-written a paper that called for Google to be made a public utility and praised Lina Khan, the Democrat chair of the Federal Trade Commission, the main US competition regulator, for her efforts in trying to rein in the tech giants - even as some of his fellow Republicans have been criticising her for being too aggressive towards them.

"I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is actually doing a pretty good job," Mr Vance told a conference in February this year.

That suggests Mr Vance's approach to tech is rather more nuanced than some people are assuming.

His attitude in general appears to be welcoming to disruptors and start-ups and supportive of innovation and competition - but rather more hostile towards tech giants that inhibit consumer choice and, in his own words, are "so obsessed on pricing power within the market that it ignores all the other things that really matter."

It should make for some fascinating discourse with the tech sector should he become vice-president.

The above is the detailed content of JD Vance: Donald Trump\'s pro-crypto running mate has impeccable Silicon Valley connections. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!