tl;dr: where cryptoeconomics and politics will intersect.
Cynthia Lummis is a first-term Senator from Wyoming.
She has made waves within the crypto community because she is the first politician to openly hold Bitcoin.
There are a few others who are pro-Bitcoin/crypto. There’s a blockchain caucus in the House of Representatives. Of course, there are plenty who are anti.
Over the past few years, the most well-recognized advocates for Bitcoin and blockchain in DC have been Coin Center and the Digital Chamber of Commerce.
They both have done tremendous work in educating lawmakers about the potential for crypto assets to unleash the innovative forces in our economy.
However, neither of these organizations are Political Action Committees in the sense that they don’t give money directly to candidates.
Which got me wondering if any PACs had formed to support pro-Crypto candidates?
Turns out, there is one.
HODLpac
Appropriately enough, it is called “HODLPac”.
HODL, of course, is a rallying cry of crypto owners (“hold on for dear life”) and its mission is:
to give American citizens using, building, and supporting the decentralized economy a venue to organize politically and affect change in Washington, DC.
I should note that this post is not an endorsement of the PAC. I have just had one email exchange with the director, Tyler, and haven’t done significant due diligence. Still, I love the fact that something like this exists.
But wait, as they say, there’s more.
Community-Governed PAC
Not only is HODLpac the first entity designed to support pro-crypto political candidates, they have a plan to innovate on HOW they support these candidates.
As Tyler writes:
“We’re inspired by DAOs as a way to coordinate pools of capital/resources and want to apply that to political donations – donors/participants in the HODLpc community make the decisions on who we should support.
We’re currently in the process of revamping our voting process, but in 2020 we used ERC20 tokens (called HODLvotes) on the Rinkeby test net and experimented with quadratic voting.
Learn more about how it worked here: https://docs.hodlpac.org/“
In other words, PAC contributors (both financially and presumably in other ways, e.g. social sharing) will have voting rights into how money is allocated to candidates.
So, instead of a small group of people making the call, any member of the PAC will be able to vote and, because it will all happen “on chain,” votes and donations will be completely transparent.
This is the revolutionary part of this PAC, imho. Bringing cryptoeconomics to crypto lobbying which, if implemented well, could revolutionize the PAC industry itself.
The Politics of Crypto
Government and congress is sure to become a bigger battlefield in the years to come as those who realize our future depends on crypto innovation battle those who are intent on living in the past.
It’s great to see something like HODLpac come on the scene so the forces of innovation and progress have some real money on their side.
