Who is cryptocurrency exec hosting Silicon Valley fundraiser?

Tech entrepreneur Mike Belshe was set to host vice presidential contender Ohio Sen. JD Vance for his second fundraising go to to the Bay Space on Monday in his Palo Alto residence.

Belshe is one in all a number of tech executives who have come out in support of the GOP ticket or have helped of their efforts to lift more money.

Vance labored carefully early on in his profession in enterprise capital in San Francisco with enterprise capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and counts billionaire investor Marc Andreessen and Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk as amongst his tech business connections.

Donald Trump’s Republican vice presidential choose is hoping to make use of his Silicon Valley connections to bolster the conflict chest of the Republican presidential marketing campaign.

And the tickets to the fundraiser come at a steep value. A $25,000 donation per particular person contains participation within the roundtable, a photograph and dinner with the vice presidential candidate. For $15,000, attendees can get a photograph and dinner, whereas $3,300 permits participation within the dinner solely.

Final time Vance, identified for his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” about his Appalachian roots, was within the Bay Space in June, he helped elevate $12 million on the San Francisco residence of billionaire tech entrepreneur David Sacks.

The announcement that Belshe, a crypto government, would host Vance for the fundraiser ought to come as no shock. Trump has positioned himself as a pro-crypto president if he have been to be elected for an additional time period.

According to a Newsweek report, the previous president spoke at a cryptocurrency convention on Saturday, making 5 main guarantees to the cryptocurrency business. These guarantees included preventing inflation with crypto-friendly insurance policies, encouraging the usage of extra power for cryptocurrency mining, and firing a authorities official considered as anti-crypto.

Listed here are 5 issues to learn about Belshe:

— Belshe is the CEO and co-founder of BitGo, a pioneering cryptocurrency pockets, digital asset belief and safety firm based mostly in Palo Alto. The corporate was based in 2013 by Belshe and Ben Davenport, a former software program engineer with Google and Fb. BitGo’s valuation was pegged at $1.75 billion final yr after securing Sequence C funding.

— As a pc engineer, Belshe helped program the SPDY protocol, which made internet searching quicker, and authored HTTP/2.0, which allowed web sites to speak with customers’ internet browsers extra effectively.

— Belshe started his tech profession as a software program engineer at Hewlett Packard in 1993 earlier than becoming a member of Netscape in 1995, the place he labored on the Netscape Enterprise server.

— He is an alumnus of California Polytechnic State College-San Luis Obispo, graduating in 1993. Based on his LinkedIn profile, Belshe was voted “Laptop Science Senior of the 12 months.”

— Belshe has been posting political content material on his X account over the previous month. On July 27, two days earlier than the fundraiser, he posted this pro-cryptocurrency quote from Trump: “Bitcoin is not a risk to the US greenback. They’ve it backwards. The US authorities is the largest risk to the US greenback.”

“Bitcoin is not a risk to the US greenback. They’ve it backwards. The US authorities is the largest risk to the US greenback.”

– President Donald Trump

— Mike Belshe (@mikebelshe) July 27, 2024