Winklevoss twins donate $1m each to Trump as champion of cryptocurrency | US political financing
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Cryptocurrency tycoons the Winklevoss twins each donated $1 million in bitcoins to Donald Trump’s campaign and pledged to vote for the former president in November, claiming Joe Biden has “openly declared war on crypto.”
Trump Is “Pro-Bitcoin, Pro-Crypto, Pro-Business”, Cameron Winklevoss declared to H, formerly Twitter, on Thursday. “And he will end the Biden administration’s war on crypto.”
Tyler Winklevoss also posted a lengthy critique of Joe Biden’s crypto policies. “It’s time to take our country back,” he declared. “It’s time for the crypto army to send a message to Washington. Attacking us is political suicide.
He argued that the Biden administration used its regulators to stifle the crypto industry in a move that “contaminated the mission and corrupted the integrity of these agencies.”
“The Biden administration tried to destroy all of that. I will not stand idly by and leave them. I will continue to fight for what I know is so right,” he wrote.
At a fundraiser in San Francisco earlier this month, Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — cast himself as a champion of cryptocurrency and denounced attempts by Democrats to regulate the sector.
The Winklevoss brothers are each worth $2.7 billion, according to Forbes. They are grappling with a crypto crackdown amid the wider fallout from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange.
The brothers sued Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook from them nearly two decades ago, before founding the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange.
Gemini, which is run by the twins, has been banned from operating any crypto lending programs in New York after it allegedly misled thousands of investors about the risks associated with its Earn scheme. Letitia James, State Attorney General, claimed that “hundreds of thousands of people” were “duped”.
The company said is “pleased to announce” that it has reached an agreement with James’ office.
The twins first became famous when they were featured in the movie The Social Network about the birth of Facebook. They were at Harvard University with Zuckerberg, who they later sued, claiming he stole their idea for a website they called Harvard Connection, but which he called Facebook. Facebook later settled for $65 million.
Reuters contributed reporting
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