Kamala Harris made her first public statement amid her campaign for the United States presidency — vowing to encourage investment in artificial intelligence and digital assets during a Wall Street fundraiser.
“We will partner together to invest in America’s competitiveness, to invest in America’s future. We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets while protecting our consumers and investors,” Harris said at a fundraiser in Manhattan, Bloomberg reported on Sept. 22.
“We will create a safe business environment with consistent and transparent rules of the road,” Harris said. “We will invest in semiconductors, clean energy and other industries of the future, and we will cut needless bureaucracy.”
It’s the first time Harris has made a public remark about crypto since she became the Democratic Party’s presidential frontrunner. Her Republican rival Donald Trump has also worked to woo the industry.
The crypto industry has been waiting for this moment to see if the Vice President would branch off from President Joe Biden’s approach — who some have seen as unfriendly to the sector.
Last month, Harris’ senior campaign adviser Brian Nelson hinted she would support crypto policies if she wins the November election but said the industry needs “rules of the road” as some companies have collapsed.
“This is an important and constructive statement from Kamala Harris,” Coinbase policy chief Faryar Shirzad said in a Sept. 22 X post.
“It’s not nearly as forward-leaning as the concrete and visionary positions taken by Donald Trump, but it’s still notable because she recognizes digital asset innovation as being important and on par with AI,” Shirzad added.
Alexander Grieve, the government affairs vice president at venture firm Paradigm, called Harris’ remarks “encouraging” on X, adding that regardless of who wins in November, “this should be the last anti-crypto administration.”
“This is progress and progress is good,” crypto venture firm Variant’s legal chief Jake Chervinsky wrote on X. “But ‘while protecting our consumers and investors’ could mean a lot of things.”
“The anti-crypto army uses ‘consumer protection’ as a smoke screen to conceal their attempts to destroy our industry,” he claimed. “I, for one, want to see policy details.”
Related: Kamala Harris campaign may focus on highlighting innovation over crypto
Crypto has become a campaign issue as US crypto companies, including Coinbase, Ripple and Gemini, have spent nearly $120 million to influence November’s elections, the advocacy group Public Citizen reported last month.
Trump has already shilled four lines of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), backed his family’s crypto platform, and closely embraced the crypto industry.
He’s promised to be a “crypto president” and to sack Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whose agency has launched multiple enforcement actions against the country’s most prominent crypto players.
Harris and Trump are neck-and-neck in national polls — Harris is ahead of Trump by only 2.9 percentage points, according to Sept. 22 FiveThirtyEight data.
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