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Vice President Kamala Harris’ strong performance in Tuesday night’s debate with Former President Donald Trump seems to have won her support from some voters, and sent cryptocurrency stocks down.
Bitcoin fell as much as 2.6% after the debate, before shedding some of those losses. It’s now trading at $56,746 as of 7:45 a.m. ET on Wednesday. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is down 2.5% and trading at $2,327; Dogecoin, the meme-coin favored by Trump supporter and Tesla (TSLA-0.91%) CEO Elon Musk, is down 3%; Solana is down by more than 2%.
The market’s reaction comes as a second Trump administration looks less likely after the former president found himself playing defense on issues including abortion, often playing into his Democratic rival’s hand and appearing rattled. His odds of winning the election, according to online betting website Polymarket, fell from 52% as of Tuesday morning to 49% as of Wednesday.
According to a CNN (WBD+2.58%) flash poll, 63% of debate-watchers who are registered to vote say Harris performed better than Trump on the debate stage. Although, most said it wouldn’t affect how they voted in November.
While Trump once called Bitcoin a scam, he’s turned around on the decentralized currency and now refers to himself as the “crypto president.” In recent months, Trump has been courting the crypto lobby and cementing himself as an advocate, which has won him the support of tech leaders like the billionaire Winklevoss Twins and the founders of a16z, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
While speaking to a crowd of some 3,000 people at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville earlier this year, Trump promised to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler on his first day in office because of his opposition to cryptocurrency. Trump also promised to establish a strategic national Bitcoin reserve, reaffirmed his stance that the U.S. must emerge as a crypto capital and superpower in the world, and claimed Bitcoin may one day surpass the market cap of gold.
“This [Bitcoin] is the steel industry of 100 years ago,” he said.
Both Trump and his wife, Former First Lady Melania Trump, have also made money off crypto, namely due to their collections of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. According to disclosures, the Republican presidential nominee also owns between $1 million and $5 million in Ethereum.
Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., have been teasing a new crypto project called World Liberty Financial for weeks now. Although the upcoming platform promises decentralized control, 70% of the platform’s governance tokens, WLFI, could be kept by insiders — founders, team members, and service providers, CoinDesk reported.