Cryptocurrency tycoons the Winklevoss twins have each donated $1m in bitcoin to Donald Trump’s campaign and pledged to vote for the former president in November, claiming Joe Biden had “openly declared war against crypto”.
Trump is “pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, pro-business”, Cameron Winklevoss declared on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday. “And he will put an end to the Biden Administration’s war on crypto.”
Tyler Winklevoss also posted a lengthy critique of Joe Biden’s policies on crypto. “It’s time to take our country back,” he declared. “It’s time for the crypto army to send a message to Washington. That attacking us is political suicide.”
He claimed the Biden administration had used its regulators to stifle the crypto industry in a move that had “polluted the mission and corrupted the integrity of these agencies”.
“The Biden Administration has tried to tear all of this down. I am not going to stand by idly and let them. I’m going to continue fighting for what I know to be so right,” he wrote.
At a San Francisco fundraiser earlier this month, Trump – the presumptive Republican presidential candidate – presented himself as a champion for cryptocurrency and slammed Democrats’ attempts to regulate the sector.
The Winklevoss brothers are each worth $2.7bn, according to Forbes. They have been grappling with a crypto crackdown, amid the wider fallout from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange.
Nearly two decades ago, the brothers sued Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook from them, before they founded the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini.
Gemini, which the twins run, has been banned from operating any crypto-lending programs in New York after allegedly misleading thousands of investors on the risks associated with its Earn scheme. Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, claimed that “hundreds of thousands of people” had been “swindled”.
The firm said it was “pleased to announce” it had reached an agreement with James’s office.
The twins first came to prominence when they were portrayed in the film The Social Network about the birth of Facebook. They were at Harvard University with Zuckerberg, whom they later sued, claiming he stole their idea for a website that they called Harvard Connection, but which he called The Facebook. Facebook later settled, for $65m.
Reuters contributed reporting
