Vivek Ramaswamy’s Presidential Platform for Crypto

The vision of the Constitution was one of decentralization. The idea that different states could compete. It allowed people the different choice of which rails they wanted to ride, bound by a common set of ideals. It's up to the people to choose in a decentralized manner. That's how you actually hold each one to be the best accountable to be the best version of itself. I mean, you have different cryptocurrencies. You could say the same thing. That was the vision of the Founding Fathers. Federalism, decentralization. It's baked into the Constitution, the tenth and final of the amendments in that original Bill of Rights, enshrined that principle of decentralization into the very DNA of this country. And I think that's part of the DNA that we need to revive in this country as well.

Bankless Nation, we have a simple agenda today. We've got a US presidential candidate who's just rolled out a pro-crypto policy. And this is the first one we've seen out in the wild. His name is Vivek Ramaswamy, and he plans to protect three core crypto freedoms. Number one, the freedom to code. Number two, the freedom of financial self-reliance. And number three, the freedom from regulatory overreach. We talk about his pro-crypto candidacy today. Guys, since this is an episode with a politician, we feel compelled to add a note at the front of this. Bankless is not a political podcast. We don't divide on red or blue party lines. We have no party affinity. What we do care about is the values of decentralization, autonomy, and power to the people that underlie crypto technology. This is why David and I go bankless. And when these values get political, so do we. We almost have to. We've had Democrats represented on Bankless, like Representative Richie Torres, he's been on the podcast. We've also had Republicans on the podcast, like the one you're about to hear from. We'd host Ted Cruz, we'd host AOC. David, we'd even host Elizabeth Warren. I mean, come on, let's just have a conversation. That is the goal for the Bankless podcast. This is also a signal for politicians. If you are a politician, know that one in five Americans now own crypto. 60% of those are Generation Z and millennial. If your political platform doesn't have a sensible policy on crypto, you better get one. And when you do, you can come on Bankless and we'll talk about it. Vivek will be on in just a minute, but before we do, we want to tell you about Bankless Nation. We are excited to introduce you to Vivek Ramaswamy. He's a 38-year-old Republican presidential candidate. And 38 years old, I think that makes him a millennial, which makes him, might I remind you, a bit more likely to own crypto. Vivek is an entrepreneur, he's worked in finance, he talks a lot about freedom, and most importantly, he's brought us a new policy platform on crypto that, if elected, he will implement. And that is why we are doing the show today. Vivek, welcome to Bankless.

It's good to be on, man. How are you?

Ah, we are doing uh fantastic, actually. It's it's starting to uh to start to turn around for crypto, I feel like. And um this part of the reason we brought you on is actually 2022, the end of 2022, and 2023 has been kind of a bad year with respect to the US government and crypto. A lot of the policies coming out of the US government have been what we would say as overtly crypto hostile. Now, you've just come out with a pro crypto policy. Most presidential candidates do not have a crypto policy at all, neither pro nor against or anything. So want to start with this question, Vivek. Why is crypto important to you? Why have you decided to come out with a crypto policy at all?

Well, look, I'm actually not born and raised in the world of crypto. I come out of a different world, the world of biotech,

but I see some of the same parallels of how a government that is fundamentally hostile

to innovation

uses its own power to trample on people who actually innovate in a way, especially now in crypto, even more so than in biotech.

That calls out the hypocrisies of government itself.

And so I was first drawn to Bitcoin, I would say, intellectually, when the first version of Code is law came out as an alternative worldview, that there should be a total opt-out from the current financial system and regime as a way of holding the current system accountable.

I think that competition is the best source of innovation, but competition is also the best source of accountability.

The Federal Reserve, I think, has failed over the course of the last 25 years. I mean, our generation, we grew up into it. Real wage growth has been effectively flat for the bottom 99%

over the course of the last 25 years because the Federal Reserve has been trying to play God. My view, and it has been for a long time, that the dollar should be pegged to a basket of commodities, but it hasn't been.

But the best alternative to that is actual competition and opt out from that system.

So I think that's actually the true promise of crypto broadly. It's the true promise of decentralized finance, it is an opt-out from the existing architecture that itself is broken, which in turn holds the feet of the current architecture to the fire to do the right thing.

So that's why it's inherently important. Now I get to the question of what are the threats to crypto, they're the same as the threats to a lot of our other freedoms.

It's that the people who we've elected to run the government,

they're not the ones who are actually running the government.

It's instead this cancerous managerial bureaucracy, the three letter agencies, that are doing through the back door.

What Congress would have never passed through the front door. And so, as somebody who is pro-crypto myself, I still would accept a result as a citizen of this country,

where if the people of this country, through the front door of our electoral process, voted for or voted for congressmen who decided to pass laws that banned the trading of cryptocurrencies in the United States, that'd be an awful decision.

That'd be something a decision that I would disagree with personally.

But at least it would be a democratically backstop decision in this country.

Of course, that would never happen. We could go through the facts of why. The number of people who are now users of cryptocurrency would probably make that never actually happen. But if that happened through the front door, at least that's following the constitutional process.

What's happening today

is really legislating through the back door what Congress never could have actually accomplished through the front door under the Constitution.

And so for me, that's actually the core of my entire presidential campaign, not as it applies to crypto, but as it applies to every sphere of our life. Regulations crippling the energy sector that weren't ever passed by Congress, but which have made the U.S. less competitive. The same thing with respect to healthcare, the regulation of drugs. You can go straight down the list.

It's the defining threat of our time is that government actors are doing through the back door what they could not get done through the front door under the Constitution, and that's wrong.

So the idea of Vivek of this anti, this managerial anti-uh crypto class, do you do you think that's the explanation for some of the issues that we've been seeing? So just let us describe this for a minute. So in crypto is very much felt like a, in fact, we call it operation choke point 2.0. Do you know the US did sort of an operation choke point where it squeezed off its banking sector from various sectors of ill repute uh during the Obama administration? This is what this has felt like only with respect to crypto. So we've got major crypto crypto startups and crypto exchanges, crypto companies that can't get bank accounts, essentially. They're like blacklisted. We've got various politicians launching uh anti-crypto armies. And we're trying to figure out we're sitting here in crypto and we're scratching our heads and we're like, who's asking for this? Because the people aren't asking for this. Vivek, we've got one in America, one in five Americans that own crypto. And by the way, 60% of those are millennial and Gen Z. And on behalf of our generations, we're certainly not asking for any of this. So where's this um this demand to choke off crypto? Where do you think it's coming from?

So I think it's far deeper than just an assault on crypto. So what I would ask folks in the crypto community to do for a second is to take a step back.

Outside of the

lane of crypto to really understand that this is part of a much more comprehensive project.

I think it's a comprehensive project of

you know it's a threat to liberty that takes the form of

very different form than you saw in the 20th century.

You know, look at what's happening in tech in the land of censorship. Okay, large tech companies.

Are using large large government is using big tech companies to do through the back door what government couldn't do through the front door under the Constitution. So the government through the front door, let's take something else. We're not talking about crypto for a second, we're talking about speech.

Though you could use similar analogies. I mean, is code a form of speech? I think there's strong arguments that they are. So we'll come back to that.

Mm-hmm.

But let's just talk about actual old school political speech.

The government cannot censor that directly through the front door because of this pesky thing we call the First Amendment. Or pesky for the government, at least.

Well, what are they doing? They're instead using regulations to get tech companies to censor through the back door what government couldn't censor through the front door. Regulations that give them special forms of immunity if they actually do it. They threaten those tech companies with added regulations unless they do it.

So it's not the government doing it directly. It's it's outsourced its dirty work to get done through the back door what the government couldn't itself get done through the front door.

Now you look at other areas. Again, we're still outside of crypto here. Look at the ESG movement in capital markets. Why do firms like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard use their voting power in corporate America's boardrooms to vote for environmental and social agendas that don't advance?

the interests of the actual shareholder base of that company. That's a curiosity.

Well again, it's because government actors like CalPers, the California State Pension Fund, or the New York State Pension Fund.

Effectively tell the black rocks of the world that you don't get to manage our trillions of dollars unless you adopt agendas that we couldn't pass through the front door. Green New Deal couldn't get it done through the front door, do it through the back door. Emissions caps imposed on companies, racial equity audits, and so on, that would have never passed in Congress or never passed in a state legislature, but they use that state legislature's money nonetheless to be able to get it done through the back door.

So now you look at the world of crypto. Again, the same thing is

if you ask through the front door, do you want the people of this country? Well, 20% are crypto users, many of the young people are as well.

Is that going to be something that we say, no, no, we banned this. We're against this? Of course not. The government couldn't get away with that. So they're using the backdoor actors at the SEC and elsewhere

to create tortured interpretations of historical regulations that I'll get to on in a second are themselves unconstitutional

to be able to wean this out of existence. So where is it coming from?

It's coming from the managerial class.

It's coming from the people who are never elected to run the government.

It's coming from a bureaucracy whose very existence is threatened by anything that resembles decentralization.

And so what they realize is they're going to hold on to their power, they're going to hold on to their dominion and control more effectively if the threats to their existence are sidelined, and they have the power to do it invisibly through the backdoor regulations

that Congress never actually passed. And in my opinion, Congress never even gave those agencies the power to pass either.

So let's let's talk about uh then your pr your presidential platform with respect to crypto policy. So as of today, I believe you have just rolled out a uh platform for crypto and it has three planks. Uh we'll we'll get to what those those planks are in a minute. Um, but you know, I guess from from the crypto community's perspective, we are looking, really looking for some presidential leadership here because the president has the power of the executive branch. That's right. They are tied up. They are like doing nothing. Hopefully, at one point in time, we'll have some uh sensible crypto regulate uh regulation, the lawmaking, but you know, that that's at some point in the future. And then we've got the court system, which works, but it moves very slowly. And there are even some um things that the court system really can't cover because it hasn't really been defined into law. And so that leaves the executive branch, which is essentially in control of this managerial class, it seems like all of our regulators fall under this branch. And uh over the last couple of years, it seems like the existing White House has taken a negative posture on crypto for some reason that we can't figure out why. So let's talk about the positive vision. Let's talk about your vision, Vivek. You've got three planks to this crypto platform. I'm gonna read them out. And what I'd like to do is go through them kind of one by one. And you tell us why you think it's important, why it's included here. The first is plank one freedom to code.

The second, freedom of financial self-reliance. The third, freedom from regulatory overreach. Okay, so those are the three planks of the platform. The first, this freedom to code Vivek. Um

Let's talk about that for a minute. You've got this line in your platform that says direct government prosecutors will prosecute bad actors, not the code they use, and not the developers who write that code. So focusing the product prosecutors on bad actors and not the code. Let me talk about the the counter that we have so far in crypto. We've got some developers of privacy technology. It's a technology called Tornado Cash. Some of them have been arrested. Some of them are now in jail. This is open source encryption tech, right? And they're in jail. We've got code that's been put on the OFAC sanction list. We've got this creeping surveillance state that seems like because it's a transaction on the blockchain, they have the right and the ability to sanction whatever they want. Tell us about this first tenant, this freedom to code. Why is that a core part of your platform?