Cynthia Lummis. Source: CNBC
Republican candidate Cynthia Lummis, endorsed by President Donald Trump, has won the US Senate race in Wyoming. She will become the first woman to serve as US Senator in Wyoming’s history and one of the first Bitcoin proponents in Senate as she initially purchased BTC back in 2013.
Lummis served as Wyoming’s only US House member from 2009 to 2017. As former Senator Mike Enzi announced his retirement, Lummis received President Trump’s endorsement and became the favorite to win the Senate spot.
She won the race, as reported earlier, and will be sworn in on January 3rd, 2021. She will become Wyoming’s first female Senator.
Apart from this historic achievement, the senator-elect also has ties with the cryptocurrency community. During the third annual Wyoming Blockchain Stampede earlier this year, she admitted purchasing her first bitcoins in 2013, when the asset traded around $300.
Lummis learned about the primary cryptocurrency from her son-in-law – the Chief Product Officer of the digital asset financial services company Unchained Capital.
She outlined Bitcoin’s limited supply as its most distinguished merit. “Knowing that there are only going to be 21 million bitcoins makes it an attractive store of value,” she explained.
In contrast, Lummis noted that she has “long worried about the Federal Reserve’s program of quantitative easing and the amount of debt on which our nation’s economy’s future rests.”
It seems rather appropriate that perhaps one of the first bitcoin holders and supporters in the US Senate comes from the state of Wyoming. The tenth-largest US state by area has granted official banking licenses to two cryptocurrency companies in the past few months alone.
The veteran US-based digital asset exchange Kraken received a banking charter issued by the Wyoming Banking Board. The license will enable Kraken to offer its services to clients in more jurisdictions, and that the company will get access to existing federal payments infrastructure.
Avanti Financial Group followed Kraken’s steps shortly after. Founded by a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, Caitlin Long, AVG became the second cryptocurrency company with such a banking license.
Interestingly, Long was among the first to congratulate Lummis for her victory on Twitter.
Featured Image Courtesy of Bloomberg. The article was first published on: Nov 4, 2020
