This Week on Crypto Twitter: Trump Support Surges After Shooting, Degens Brush Off Germany’s Bitcoin Dumps

We thought we’d seen everything last week had to offer, not to mention Crypto Twitter’s reactions to it all. But then on Saturday afternoon, former U.S. president and current presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally.

Trump survived what the FBI has described as an assassination attempt with an injury to his ear. He was rushed to safety by Secret Service members as the shooter, identified by law enforcement as 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, was swiftly taken out by the federal security service.

Political leaders across the United States and the world condemned the attack. And amid concern and relief that Trump had survived, some business leaders took the moment to cast their support behind the Republican candidate.

Twitter owner Elon Musk quickly endorsed Trump after recently donating to a Trump-centric super PAC, and then prominent hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Tron founder Justin Sun similarly threw their support behind Trump.

The election has been framed by crypto industry advocates as a battle for the future of future of cryptocurrency in the United States. And since Trump is the pro-crypto candidate, many traders took his survival and the rousing wave of Trump support as bullish signs.

Bitcoin spiked in price immediately after the shooting, while Trump-themed meme coins saw skyrocketing gains. Trump’s chances of winning the election also jumped on top crypto prediction markets platform Polymarket, hitting an all-time high around 70% late Saturday.

Earlier in the week, before political violence shocked the nation, the German government unloaded the totality of its billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin holdings in a rapid-fire sequence of massive selloffs.

Twitter users held their breath, waiting to see if Bitcoin would plunge even further than it already had. But the Gods of Crypto were merciful: Towards the end of the week, as Germany moved the last of its BTC from its wallets, Bitcoin began to rise again. 

Analysts cautiously expressed confidence that the world’s top cryptocurrency was poised to hold out—not only against the German government’s BTC sales, but also through the looming repayment of billions of dollars worth of BTC to Mt. Gox creditors. 

In typical Crypto Twitter fashion, though, users couldn’t just take the win and go home. Many turned their relief into spiteful glee, bashing the German government for failing to HODL. 

Some were convinced that the bottom for Bitcoin was now finally in, comparing the moment to the early 2000s, when gold shot up in value after some governments sold off their supplies of the commodity. 

Meanwhile, amid turmoil in Washington and building pressure for President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race, crypto had an unusually prominent week in the national political spotlight.

The close-up began on Monday, when Republicans approved a draft party platform ahead of the Republican National Convention that explicitly embraced crypto, in a first for a major American political party.

Prominent Crypto Twitter personalities immediately hailed the platform as exactly what crypto users are looking for from their political leaders. 

Later in the week, in a stark reminder of crypto’s increasingly partisan hue on Capitol Hill, the House failed to override Biden’s veto of a bill that would have allowed American banks to hold crypto.

Crypto policy experts criticized the vote, which failed to attract the substantial number of Democratic defectors required to achieve a veto-proof supermajority—but they hadn’t necessarily expected the measure, a repeal of SAB 121, to overcome those steep odds. 

In some twinkle of hope for bipartisan consensus on crypto, though, prominent Democratic lawmakers hosted a crypto roundtable on Thursday to establish a more fluid dialogue with industry leaders. One of Biden’s most trusted senior advisors, Anita Dunn, attended the meeting, which left several attendees feeling cautiously optimistic. 

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.