Billionaires Couldn't Stop Mamdani. Here's Why That Could Be Good for Crypto

In case you haven't noticed, crypto has been getting weirdly political. And if you also haven't noticed, crypto has been getting very friendly with Wall Street.

More specifically, some of Wall Street's most powerful billionaires have begun embracing crypto after historically rejecting it, or outright calling it a scam or a fraud. Two weeks ago, BlackRock's Larry Fink was promoting Bitcoin at a conference in Saudi Arabia, where he was flanked by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who had flipped his stance to admit crypto, stablecoins, and blockchains were all very real.

"Crypto is real," Dimon said, "blockchains, stablecoins ... smart contracts are real all that stuff is real, it will be used by all of us."

Next to them both, was billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who spoke on the same stage about the threat of New York electing Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani.

"Having a socialist mayor, I think would be catastrophic for New York," Ackman said. "He's correct ... that affordability is the number one issue for many people in New York City. He's correct on the issue but he's incorrect on the solution."

Ackman was among the many billionaires who rallied around Andrew Cuomo in the final sprint to the election. Despite that, Mamadani won, and the revolutionary new path for New York is now here.

It's an interesting backdrop at a time when Wall Street's most powerful leaders are also embracing Bitcoin and crypto — which was born out of an equal rejection of the traditional financial system and bank bailouts when the first genesis block was mined in 2009.

Now, things in crypto look extremely different: Not only have BlackRock and other institutions stepped in to institutionalize Bitcoin, but the tokenization of traditional securities and trading is looking like it might completely copy the old system — just onchain. But is that really the revolution Bitcoin sparked? Did Bitcoin really pioneer disintermediation and community-ownership just to see Wall Street step in and re-intermediate everything?

It's something even PayPal founder Peter Thiel has been calling out ever since BlackRock's Larry Fink pulled his 180 on Bitcoin to launch his fund's Bitcoin ETF to pull in more than $200 million in annual revenues.

"The sort of ideological founding vision of Bitcoin or these cryptocurrencies was sort of a cypherpunk, crypto-anarchist, libertarian anti-centralized government thing ... the question is does it really work that way, or has that thread gotten lost?"

Peter Thiel’s question cuts to the heart of where crypto now stands — and what Zohran Mamdani’s unlikely rise could mean for the movement that once sought to upend the very system those billionaires represent.

Because for all the panic that Ackman, Trump, and others tried to stoke around Mamdani’s campaign, the issues that powered his landslide rise to power sound oddly familiar to anyone who’s followed Bitcoin’s roots: the sense that ownership has become unattainable, that the game is rigged, and that the people closest to power always seem to win. Mamdani’s message wasn’t about tearing down capitalism for the sake of it — it was about rewriting the terms of who gets to own what. “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” he said in his victory speech.

That’s not so different from what Bitcoin’s earliest believers were chasing in 2009. When Satoshi Nakamoto embedded “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” into Bitcoin’s first block, it was a rejection of the elite financial order — a call to rebuild from the bottom up.

But if you look at what's happening with tokenized equities — Wall Street is almost entirely replicating their same process. To add a bunch of intermediaries to the mix. To remove a direct relationship between using a network like Bitcoin, and reaping those rewards by being a direct owner in that network.

This hits very close to home for us at Coinage, offering the ability for anyone to co-own the first community-owned media outlet as a U.S. co-op built onchain. And to be fair, we aren’t the first crack at that. We’re just the first to actually deliver on it. There were a couple attempts before — but where are they now?

There was of course Forbes’ Web3 media project, which launched and sold NFTs, only to quietly shut down earlier this year. And then, there’s Bankless, which originally launched as a podcast and newsletter before also launching a DAO that had the same name as that podcast and newsletter.

Because of that, many people boosted and promoted Bankless by buying into the DAO and the mission, thinking they were owning one and the same, until controversy struck and people realized that wasn’t really the case. As Bankless later cleared up, the DAO didn’t actually own the Bankless IP — that was under a different entity.

But that obviously didn’t sit too well with people who had bought into the mission — especially since they were told they all co-owned things together. The Bankless forum has since been deleted, but an archived site still shows the back and forth as Bankless DAO members realized they didn’t actually own the Bankless name.

One user wrote, “We hoisted the flag, we still bear the banner, and this is how you treat us. ... We must ask ourselves, do we walk the walk and talk the talk? Are WE the embodiment of the Bankless Nation?” Another user wrote, “The DAO is being strong-armed and left hanging in the wind while we bleed out,” because they trusted they wouldn’t get rugged.

It's worth noting while that’s how the people who thought they owned Bankless felt, the people who actually did own Bankless went on to leverage the name and IP into launching a $35 million crypto VC fund (and is working on launching a second for $50 million.) So maybe that’s a good example of why ownership matters — because it’s often the difference between making money and making nothing. And maybe it’s an even better reminder of what’s at stake here, because the divide between real owners and those who think they own something is only continuing to grow larger in America.

It’s also why Coinage and all its IP are actually co-owned by the people who mint NFTs and become co-op members, so the same thing doesn’t get repeated here. Does fighting for that make us socialist, or just advocates of what Bitcoin fought for applied to media? Because in order for crypto’s revolution to work, ownership isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a need-to-have.

Make no mistake — the ownership revolutions are here. It's just somewhat fitting that the epicenter is New York right now, where Wall Street is embracing crypto and a Democratic Socialist rises to power.

Coinage is a community-owned DAO letting our NFT holders become actual co-owners in one of the fastest-growing Web3 media outlets. Mint an NFT and become a member today to open a path to patronage dividends, or stake with us to support our project. Subscribe to our free Substack to catch all the important headlines from around the crypto world.