Could crypto lose its candidate?

Miami Mayor Denis Suarez, who’s running for president of the United States, took a shot at his Republican counterpart in the presidential race, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. 

Emphasizing his own support for crypto, Suarez said about DeSantis: “You gotta go beyond just saying that the central bank digital currencies are bad. Everybody agrees on that. That’s a very easy position.”

That incident tells a lot about the role crypto could have in the upcoming presidential race, but it says even more about DeSantis, who, until recently, was the most prominent “crypto candidate” in the field.

Now the politician faces harsh competition from other, vocally pro-crypto candidates, and his chances to become president or even win the Republican primaries are rapidly declining.

How DeSantis became a crypto darling

The Florida governor has been vocally supporting crypto since as early as 2021, when he proposed to allow businesses to pay state fees with cryptocurrencies in the 2022–2023 budgetary year. 

Even then, he had to compete with Suarez, who has been accepting his paychecks entirely in Bitcoin (BTC), while Miami under his mayorship became home to the “largest-ever” Bitcoin event and even got its own digital currency. In 2023, DeSantis began talking about crypto more often and his presidential ambitions. This March, he even dedicated a press conference to the potential project of an American central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Standing at a podium bearing the phrase “Big Brother’s Digital Dollar,” the politician urged Florida lawmakers and their “like-minded” counterparts to preventively prohibit the introduction of the digital dollar in their states. A CBDC is all about surveilling Americans and controlling their behavior, DeSantis added.

No CBDC in Florida https://t.co/p9pwSTmrlN

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) March 20, 2023

Later, he continued to criticize the CBDC and its potential issuer, the United States Federal Reserve, on Twitter (now called X). 

In May, DeSantis signed a bill restricting the use of CBDCs, including foreign ones, in the state. Once again, he emphasized the difference between CBDCs and private digital currencies: “I think they want to crowd out and eliminate other types of digital assets like cryptocurrency because they can’t control that, so they don’t like that.”

Later, DeSantis promised to lobby for the same prohibition if he becomes the president of the United States.

DeSantis vowed not only to…