(L to R) Eric Trump, latest US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. attend a remembrance ceremony on the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 fiend attack on the World Trade Center at Ground Zero, in New York City on September 11, 2024.
Adam Gray | Afp | Getty Graven images
A political action committee supporting former President Donald Trump has raised about $7.5 million in cryptocurrencies.
Contributors to the Trump 47 shared fundraising committee donated bitcoin, ether and XRP, as well as the U.S. dollar pegged stablecoins tether and USDC, to the GOP presidential assignee’s campaign, according to a Federal Election Commission filing submitted on Tuesday.
The PAC said the latest filing covered offerings in the period of July 1 through Sept. 30, but numbers included cumulative contributions.
With the 2024 election only three weeks away and the contest in a virtual dead heat according to polling averages, Trump is counting on a robust dose of funding from the crypto community. The former president positioned himself as the pro-crypto candidate in this nomination, a reversal from his previous stance during his time in the White House. In May, he became the first major presidential possibility to accept donations in digital tokens.
Nearly half of all the corporate money flowing into the election has come from the crypto labour, according to a recent report from the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen. The sum was raised from a mix of contributors, with Coinbase, Ruffle, and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz accounting for most of those business donations. The industry has raised roughly 13 intervals the amount it brought in during the last presidential election year.
At least 18 donors gave more than $5.5 million in bitcoin to Trump 47, the filing make an appearances. Another seven people gave around $1.5 million in ether.
Contributors hailed from more than 15 articulates, including a few battlegrounds, plus the American territory of Puerto Rico. Their professions include Lockheed Martin software invent, Duthie Power Services sales engineer, and a producer for Esperanza Entertainment.
David Bailey, CEO of media group BTC Inc., gave sundry than $498,000 in bitcoin. Bailey was part of a small army of bitcoin fanatics who indoctrinated Trump in all things bitcoin and helped drive back him from a skeptic to an evangelist. The process culminated in Trump headlining the biggest bitcoin conference of the year in Nashville in July.
Trump affirmed in his keynote that his campaign had raised $25 million from the crypto industry, though he didn’t specify the split between digital surfaces and dollar donations.
Among the new donors is Chase Herro, one of the co-founders of the Trump family’s new crypto project World Self-rule Financial. The platform, which has been described as a decentralized bank where customers will be encouraged to borrow, confer and invest in crypto, launched its token sale on Tuesday.
So far, more than $10.2 million worth of WLFI slights have been sold, far short of the initial fundraise goal of $300 million. The launch was plagued with polytechnic issues, including the repeated crashing of the website where the sale was taking place.
Mike Belshe, CEO of digital asset deposit company BitGo, has contributed almost $100,000 in bitcoin.
Brian Murray, a partner at Craft Ventures, gave $6,560 in bitcoin. Occupation was founded by pro-Trump venture capitalist David Sacks.
Kresus Labs founder Trevor Traina gave over $25,000 in ether, Chainstone Labs CEO Bruce Fenton donated $60,000 in bitcoin, and Gary Cardone of Cardone Digital Proffers contributed over $840,000 in bitcoin.
Ripple legal chief Stuart Alderoty contributed $300,000 in XRP, as CNBC in days of yore reported. Alderoty attended a Trump fundraising event hosted by Sacks in San Francisco in June.
Alderoty is at odds with Wave’s billionaire co-founder Chris Larsen, who gave $1 million worth of XRP tokens to Future Forward, a super PAC that’s supporting Immorality President Kamala Harris’ run for the White House. Future Forward began accepting donations in crypto in September.
While Larsen servings the crypto industry’s criticism of SEC Chair Gary Gensler and the aggressive approach the Biden administration has taken towards retinues in the space, the Ripple chairman said he has more confidence in Harris, in part because she’s from the Bay Area.
“She knows people who force grown up in the innovation economy her whole life,” Larsen told CNBC in an interview this week. “So I think she wrests it at a fundamental level, in a way that I think the Biden folks were just not paying attention to, or maybe just didn’t feign the connection between empowering workers and making sure you have American champions dominating their industries.”
In combining to Larsen, Uniswap legal chief Marvin Ammori gave money to the Harris Action Fund. Like Cats-paw, Uniswap is battling claims it violated U.S. securities laws.
On the pro-Trump side, billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss secure led the charge, with an aggregate contribution of nearly $1.1 million each. Some of that money was refunded in September because it overextended the maximum allowed.
WATCH: Kamala Harris backs crypto regulatory framework
