SINGAPORE — Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, said he and a group of crypto advocates are working with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris to develop her campaign’s policies on digital assets ahead of the elections in November.
“There’s a group of cryptocurrency advocates, bitcoin advocates etc. that are working alongside her to distance the Democratic Party away from Elizabeth Warren and [Gary Gensler],” he told a panel on Thursday at the annual TOKEN2049 event, one of the world’s largest crypto conferences.
Warren, a Democratic senator, and Gensler, chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, are widely seen as foes of the crypto industry, having backed regulations and crackdowns on the space.
Harris has been hearing out crypto proponents and we are pushing her to back industry-friendly policies, he said, adding that the vice president even has some of these talks lined up for this week.
“I believe that we are making progress, and I think it’s going in the right direction,” Scaramucci said.
Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Scaramucci, who endorsed Harris in the 2024 race, served as former President Donald Trump’s Communications Director at the White House in 2017 for six days, setting a record for shortest-serving person in that role.
Since then, his relationship with Trump has remained tense. Last year in an interview with NBC News’ Chuck Todd, Scaramucci called his former boss “a grifter.”
In recent months, Trump has signaled strong support for the crypto industry. He was a keynote speaker at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville in July, where he promised to ensure that the federal government never sells its bitcoin holdings and teased a plan to make the U.S. a “crypto capital of the planet.”
The Trump family recently launched a new crypto project called World Liberty Financial earlier this month, with goals set by those involved suggesting that it will resemble a crypto banking platform.
“Whatever my feelings are about President Trump, I applaud him for understanding how important this industry is for the United States, and I think ironically, he’s pulling the Democrats along into a centrist position on regulation,” Scaramucci said Thursday.
He added that he and the other crypto insiders, which he claims are working alongside Harris, want to prevent policies surrounding the industry to become a partisan issue. “We want crypto in the the U.S. to have a bipartisan standard unstrained from political and tribal conflicts.”
Meanwhile, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe, who backed Trump in the race, argued that the next U.S. president would have “tremendous power” to shape the crypto realm and the Republican candidate has been clear about where he stands on the issue.
“We have not heard the same from Harris,” Belshe said at Token2049. “Maybe she’s going to switch it up, but she really hasn’t come out and said much.”