Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was able to get another word in on cryptocurrency during a rough day for the market.
Trump joined Adin Ross for a livestream interview on the platform Kick and the two touched on a variety of topics. The 23-year-old Ross came to prominence as a video game streamer on Twitch before being banned from that platform for repeatedly using slurs.
Ross mentioned the U.S. government's recent selling of crypto and asked Trump if he would still support crypto should he win the November election.
“It's something they shouldn't be doing because they should be trying to build it,” Trump said. “If we don't do it, China's doing it, and other places are doing, and they're doing it anyway.”
Last week, a wallet labeled as belonging to the U.S. government transferred $2 billion worth of bitcoin to an unidentified wallet, according to Arkham Intelligence data. The bitcoin appeared to be tied to funds the U.S. Department of Justice previously confiscated from Silk Road. The government still holds about $11.1 billion worth of crypto.
Trump called crypto a “very modern currency” and likened it to artificial intelligence.
“It's like AI — ‘ do you love it or do you not like it?' — if we don't do it, China is going to do it, or other people are going to do it, and we can't be left behind, and crypto is right in that sphere,” Trump said. The former president has previously said he would like the U.S. to be a “Bitcoin mining superpower.”
Trump reversed his stance on cryptocurrency earlier this year and even gave a speech last month at Bitcoin 2024 in Tennessee, one of the industry's biggest conferences. That appearance alone reportedly helped raise $21 million toward his re-election campaign.
“The crypto community and industry seem clear that crypto is no longer a bipartisan issue,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a recent note. “We believe the crypto markets will trade completely top-down on political developments until the election results in early November.”
Sen. Cynthia Lummis recently drafted a bill that would push the U.S. to buy up to 200,000 bitcoin a year over a five-year period.
At publication time, the price of bitcoin was down 9%, trading around $53,797, according to The Block's BTC price page. Over that time period, it saw $118.5 billion in trading volume.