Bitcoin Broker donated $5 million to Biden campaign
One of the biggest donations to Biden’s campaign was made by an exchange that also made bets on the US election result.
Joe Biden won the race for the US presidency. One detail that has attracted a lot of attention is that one of the biggest donors of Biden’s campaign owns a bitcoin brokerage house.
According to the non-profit website OpenSecrets, which has a list of major donors to the US campaigns, Sam Bankman-Fried has donated over $5 million to Joe Biden’s campaign. Bankman-Freid is the founder of a cryptomaniac brokerage firm which, curiously enough, has offered future contracts to bet on the election result.
He was the 17th largest donor to the Democratic candidate’s campaign in the US. Among the names that donated the most for Biden’s campaign are some important ones, such as Alphabet, Google’s owner company, with a total donation of $ 6.4 million.
In total, Biden’s campaign raised about $1.3 billion, while Trump’s raised about $860 million. And a curiosity of this election is that it had the highest number of votes since 1900.
FTX has launched future contracts to bet on Trump’s or Biden’s win
FTX not only participated in the elections as a donor to the Biden campaign, but also launched options for future contracts for those who wanted to bet on the outcome and win (or lose) money. The idea was quite simple, the futures contracts would expire at US$1 if a candidate won at US$0 if he lost.
So many voters could buy Trump or Biden contracts and hope that the chosen candidate would win to maximize profits or bitter a loss.
As you can imagine, those who decided to buy future contracts must have been even more distressed by one of the toughest and most time-consuming checks in the history of elections.
On his Twitter Sam Bankman-Fried asked everyone to be patient with the whole procedure.
„This is perhaps one of the worst election nights in the US. There is a lot of discussion about the votes, about ballot boxes and procedures and a small change can have a big impact. A disqualification of only 5% of the polls in one state can change the election“.