Crypto is beginning to appear front and center in the 2024 US presidential election as Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump appear more open to the industry as a whole. Top crypto executives met with White House officials last week to voice their concerns about challenges they faced from regulators and the Biden-Harris administration.

Cornell University professor Eswar Prasad speaks on the voter demographic crypto-friendly policies open up for the two candidates, particularly Trump, heading into November.

"Trump does seem to view crypto, the crypto community, as a potential source of support, both financial and in terms of votes because this is largely a young, male-dominated ecosystem," the author of The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance tells the Market Domination team, going on to say: "What is equally interesting, though, is that the Harris campaign does seem to be somewhat more open to crypto. They haven't laid out a policy position on this yet, but there are indications that there is some outreach from the campaign to the crypto community."

But is the fact key political figures are warming up to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC-USD) and their respective ETFs, legitimizing these decentralized assets, actually hurting the crypto cause?

"The irony here is that the whole point of Bitcoin was to get away from traditional financial institutions, to get away from reliance on any sort of government trust," Prasad says. "So this was supposed to be a trustless technology, but it seems to be being swept into the arms of traditional finance and into the mainstream... So the original Bitcoin libertarians are probably not too happy, but if you own bitcoin and view it as a speculative financial asset... you're certainly probably happy now."

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.