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“The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”

— George Washington, Farewell Address

Happy non-Partisan Day!

Presidents’ Day traces its origins to 1879, when it was established as a celebration of George Washington, and officially, that’s still what it is: At the federal level, the third Monday of every February remains Washington’s Day.  

Somewhere along the line, various states began celebrating it as Washington and Lincoln Day.

Now, we mostly know it as “Presidents’ Day” because US retailers started marketing it as such in the 1980s.

Former President Washington would likely approve of this re-branding because “Presidents’ Day” has a ring of non-partisanship, and that, he thought, was all-important.

Washington belonged to no party, declined a third term to set an example of patriotic non-partisanship and, in his farewell address, warned against the dangers of political factions.  

There’s no doubt he’d be sorely disappointed in the current state of affairs in which seemingly everything is politicized — including things as technocratic as the banking system and as quantifiable as the economy.

Democrats have wanted the Federal Reserve to fight climate change and inequality; Republicans (as of recently) want to pick industrial winners via a strategic reserve.

Former President Biden allegedly weaponized the banking system; President Trump has weaponized tariffs.

Presidents of both parties have tried to bully the Fed into lowering interest rates, often successfully.

Most recently, and perhaps most ridiculously, our inflation expectations have been politicized to a comical degree:

We used to judge a president by the economy — now we judge an economy by the president.

Ugh.

But has anything been more politicized than crypto?

The non-crypto world now fully identifies crypto with the president whom it did so much to elect.

The industry’s decision to pick a political side was perhaps unavoidable as a defensive maneuver.

But I think crypto, originally designed to be beyond government control, may now be suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

One prominent crypto founder tweeted last week that “politics is the most important [go to market] play for crypto companies today…the teams that can lock in the relationships with federal agencies, institutional capital, and world leaders are the ones that survive.”

That seems like a betrayal of crypto’s original cypherpunk ethos (or whatever’s left of it) — crypto was meant to defy federal agencies and world leaders, not embrace them. 

It also seems short-sighted.

The four-year crypto cycle may be dead, but four-year political cycles are not (yet) — so the crypto industry would do well to plan for a dark time in which there’s a non-crypto president in the White House.

In the meantime, floundering crypto prices may be a timely reminder that there are limits to what politics can do for crypto.

To ensure its future, the crypto industry should probably aim for bipartisan approval — and also build for a future where it has bipartisan disapproval.

It may be that neither of those things are achievable, I don’t know.

But Presidents’ Day is a reminder that non-partisanship is something we should all aspire to.

— Byron Gilliam

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An Update on the Solana Thesis

Santi joins the show to discuss why now it’s crypto's time to accelerate adoption. Tune in for a deep dive into Santi's updated Solana thesis, crypto's biggest opportunities in 2025 and what's next for Inversion.

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