Markets Daily Gets Political: The Post-Trust Election

Today on Markets Daily we’re taking a break from our quick-hit news roundup format for a brief discussion about the U.S. election in the age of bitcoin with CoinDesk features editor Ben Schiller and privacy-beat reporter Benjamin Powers.

Yesterday, CoinDesk launched its Post-Trust Election series, looking at how politics and the U.S. presidential campaigns are grappling with issues of cryptocurrency, data security, privacy, disinformation, online voting and other areas. We spoke with Ben about why we’re launching this series and what it means. Benjamin was on the ground in South Carolina in the days leading up to that primary, heard all the major candidates speak and spoke with voters, so we wanted to see whether cryptocurrencies and blockchain were factoring into people’s thought process around the primaries and election. 

The candidates have been largely silent on the issue of cryptocurrencies, outside of the Andrew Yang campaign before it folded. But with trust in traditional institutions waning, the rise of a digital national currency in China, and whispers of the same in the U.S., the world of cryptocurrency is seemingly on a collision course with politics. In the same way things like election interference, disinformation, and the impact of tech platforms rose to national prominence in the years following 2016, we think stablecoins, decentralization and privacy will have a similar impact on the national discourse leading up to, and in the wake of, 2020.