After months of largely dodging the topic of crypto during her campaign trail, Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on Monday shared her pro-crypto agenda as part of a newly released platform to help create wealth for Black men.
The platform, dubbed “Kamala Harris Will Deliver for Black Men,” includes a pledge from Harris that if she wins the November election, she will support “a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected.”
Kamala Harris Reveals Most Outright Pro-Crypto Stance Ever
With the highly contested November 2024 election just a few weeks away, Kamala Harris has released a proposal that seeks to give protections to Black men invested in crypto. According to Harris teams’, more than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned crypto in the past.
An attached document goes further to indicate that the Vice President “appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services,” and that she will “make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.”
As part of her proposal, Harris also indicated that she would give one million loans that are fully forgivable up to $20,000 to Black entrepreneurs looking to start new businesses, roll out a health initiative focused on Black men, as well as legalizing cannabis at the federal level.
Harris’ Embrace Of Crypto; Too Little Too Late?
The crypto industry has long been speculating whether Kamala Harris would take a different approach to crypto than President Joe Biden, who most say is hostile to the sector.
However, this isn’t Harris’ first remark on crypto. During a fundraiser in Manhattan last month, the Democratic party frontrunner vowed to encourage investment in artificial intelligence and digital assets. A few days later, she affirmed plans to maintain the United States’s dominance in blockchain technology. As ZyCrypto recently reported, Ripple Executive Chairman Chris Larsen even donated XRP worth roughly $1 million to the Harris-Walz presidential campaign.
In contrast, ex-POTUS Donald Trump, running for president for a third time, has aggressively courted crypto investors and sought to raise cash from its deep-pocketed executives.
He’s promised to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” and to sack US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler, whose agency has initiated numerous enforcement actions against prominent crypto industry players instead of providing clear rules of the road. He has also launched his much-hyped decentralized finance project, the World Liberty Financial. Last month, the Republican candidate visited PubKey, a Bitcoin-themed bar in New York, and bought beef burgers for patrons using Bitcoin.
