In Defense of the Single-Issue Crypto Voter

Viktor Bunin is a Protocol Specialist at Coinbase and a GP at Credibly Neutral.

⚠️ The opinions in this post are my own and not the opinions of Coinbase.

Vitalik recently published a thoughtful post arguing against voters choosing their political allegiances mostly based on whether that party or politician is “pro-crypto.”

I disagree.

Today’s voters should strongly consider a party or politician’s stance on crypto when deciding how to vote so that future voters can select candidates that champion even more of the beliefs and technologies our community values.

My mission is to advance economic freedom in the world and crypto is the best way to do that. Economic freedom leads to higher incomes, better health care and education, lower childhood mortality, and many other things that we all want for society. There are few technologies in the world that can rival crypto in its promise to better mankind, and almost none of them are in as precarious a position as crypto.

For crypto to succeed in the future, we have to take the first step now and elect pro-crypto candidates.

The fact that there are even concepts of being “pro-crypto” or “anti-crypto” is already ludicrous, and our first objective should be to eliminate that distinction. Being anti-crypto today is like being anti-internet in the 1990s.

Unfortunately, being anti-crypto is a slogan and strategy that certain parties, politicians, and regulators have adopted. They’ve worn it proudly and wielded their hammers to go after the entire crypto ecosystem. Everything – from fundamental technologies like validators and protocols to law-abiding companies, user applications, and tokens. Many people have already called out its chilling effect on the industry, but I would go even further: anti-crypto advocates are succeeding in putting the industry on the wrong course.

Let me provide a few examples:

The SEC’s regulation by enforcement of legitimate projects is directly leading to a degeneration of innovation in the industry. Good actors like Uniswap, Solana, Filecoin, and many others are being targeted with poorly defined and unreasonable criteria that label them securities.

How does the industry respond? With memecoins; they have no ecosystem, no builders, no users, no product, no nothing.

Another example is “useless” governance tokens. Why do they exist? Because they are missing the key feature to enable a virtuous flywheel: the ability for token holders to receive a proportion of the revenues generated by the protocol. This is the obvious step to make these protocol ecosystems self-sustaining. The main reason protocols don’t add this feature is for fear of having their token incorrectly labeled as a security.

The result is that builders and consumers are losing confidence in the ability of tokens to serve as a governance mechanism for decentralized protocols, which is untrue and immensely harmful to our industry.

We use the term pro-crypto, but that’s not even really it; what we want is for parties, politicians, and regulators to be crypto-neutral.

We have to get back to a level playing field where good and fair laws and regulations can be passed that judge crypto on its merits, not partisan agendas. The pro-crypto bills that have been proposed or passed aren’t advocating for the US Treasury to buy Bitcoin, they’re common sense legislations such as creating sensible regulations for stablecoins, enabling institutions to custody crypto, and enacting consumer protection laws. 

The crypto community is asking for the bare minimum – fair treatment under the law – and I strongly advocate for everyone to become a single-issue voter to elect pro-crypto politicians that believe our industry has a right to exist and our technology can improve the world. 

Once we get back to a level playing field, we must take the second step: electing the best candidates across the globe.

We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity before us. This is the first time in human history that we have seen people all over the world become successful at the same time while holding very similar ideals and a shared value system. At any other time, the successful people in countries like America, Brazil, Nigeria, Germany, and so on were very different from one another and these differences were reflected in the governments and their priorities.

As Vitalik mentioned, crypto is not just cryptocurrencies and blockchains, it encompasses a family of technologies and a system of beliefs about the world: the right to self-sovereignty, self-custody, permissionless innovation, privacy, freedom, and so on. This is why we’re all here and why we fight so hard for crypto to have its fair shot.

It's now up to all of us in our respective countries to become politically active and to elect candidates that reflect this shared belief system in the policies and laws they write, from keeping self-custody wallets free of KYC to preserving the ability for users to leverage privacy-preserving protocols for their medical records, identity, and payments.

Fighting for crypto technologies and values on a global scale has a multiplier effect by increasing collaboration between countries on these important issues.

My mission is to advance economic freedom not just in the country I call home, but in the world, and all of us working together to defend and grow crypto is the best way to accomplish this mission.