33-year-old socialist Zohran Mamdani became a surprise favorite among the NYC mayoral candidates from the Democratic Party and is considered a likely winner in the election. Mamdani’s socialist platform is criticized for being naive and unrealistic. However, his popularity is a signal to capitalists that the masses of New Yorkers are unheard of. Why does crypto X blast Mamdani? Is he an enemy of cryptocurrencies?
Zohran Mamdani’s background and platform
Zohran Mamdani’s parents are Ugandan academic and political commentator Mahmood Mamdani and award-winning Indian American filmmaker Mira Nair. Mamdani’s family moved to the USA from Uganda when Zohran was seven.
Mamdani is Muslim and an outspoken socialist. He criticizes Israel’s actions in Palestine while opposing anti-semitism at the same time. Mamdani has a degree in African studies. Prior to starting a political career, he worked as a housing counselor. He has been a member of the New York State Assembly from the 36th district since 2021. Mamdani announced he is running for mayor of New York in October 2024.
His platform is based on the idea that New York got too expensive to live in for working-class New Yorkers, which is true, given that even one-bedroom apartments in working-class districts can cost over $3,000 or even $4,000 per month. Mamdani’s supporters use slogans such as “Freeze the Rent” and “A City We Can Afford” while Mamdani is addressing the cost-of-living crisis in his speeches. His initiatives include abolishing payment for the use of buses, creating affordable city-owned grocery stores across the city, providing public child care, freezing housing prices, and building more affordable houses.
These ideas resonated with young lodgers of New York and Asian and Latinx voters. In June, Mamdani became the leading candidate from the Democratic Party, beating former New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary. Mamdani’s success scared and angered Republicans, big business, and some of the moderate Democrats.
Can Mamdani save New York?
Just like Donald Trump before the presidency, Mamdani is criticized for lacking real experience in politics. His success owes much to social media and efficient promotion. The assembly years of Mamdani weren’t marked with any achievements. Now that his campaign has proved to be victorious, critics worry about a possible disastrous mayoral term of Mamdani.
Mamdani’s ideas are criticized for being naive and even harmful: rent grows slower than the maintenance costs for apartment owners, while the promise to build affordable housing projects totally ignores the fact that New York has already been championing this strategy for many years.
More than that, the rent prices for 40% of apartments are already controlled (landlords cannot raise the cost more than 5% a year). This policy shows poor results as the uncontrolled housing gets costlier, while controlled housing loses in quality as landlords cut expenses. Freezing the rent altogether will only make it worse.
Mamdani’s plan to tax the rich to pay off his public projects may also find opposition from the governor and state legislature. As for the buses, critics say that free buses will attract new passengers who now use the subway. This pressure may worsen the traffic jam situation.
Why does Crypto Twitter not like Mamdani?
It seems that many of Mamdani’s plans are too hard to materialize, or they are just bad at their core. However, Crypto X (Twitter) has one more reason to hate a new Democratic leader: he is not a cryptocurrency champion, while his opponents in the election are pro-crypto.
Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa promised to widen the Bitcoin ATM infrastructure back in 2021. Also, he was urging local businesses to start accepting crypto payments. The incumbent NYC mayor, who is going to get re-elected as an independent candidate, Eric Adams, is a crypto advocate who famously said that he received his first three mayoral paychecks in Bitcoin. Adams was calling New Yorkers to oppose Bitlicense, a framework that stalls cryptocurrency business in New York, and participated in various other cryptocurrency initiatives.
Mamdani is not a strong crypto proponent. He used a cryptocurrency topic as the reason to criticize former governor Andrew Cuomo, calling him out for advising an OKX exchange that broke local rules and had to pay $505 million in fines.
In 2023, Mamdani called to tighten regulations on cryptocurrency in New York, despite the fact that New York is already a tough jurisdiction for cryptocurrency businesses. Basically, that’s all Mamdani had to say about crypto during his lifetime.
It is not Mamdani’s lack of support for crypto, nor the weakness of his platform, that is the target for Crypto Twitter. It seems that many in the community simply hate Mamdani for being a socialist, Israeli military aggression critic, and “tax the rich” proponent. Some even point at his Ugandan roots as a problem or bring up the fact that Mamdani is not poor himself, as if it means he is not honest with the voters.
As many big figures in the crypto community don’t have reservations about being or becoming ultrawealthy, they seem to be angered and scared by the sudden success of Mamdani, who claimed, “I don’t think we should have billionaires because it is so much money in a moment of such inequality.”
Billionaire and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is one of the most concerned about Mamdani’s person on X. He cites the poorly based post suggesting that the results in the Democratic primary are not impressive as a thoughtful piece, and reposts various tweets that bring up Mamdani’s remoteness from the working class or his distaste for Benjamin Netanyahu as problematic.
One of the retweeted posts is by Anthony Pompliano, a cryptocurrency podcaster and the new CEO of the ProCap BTC Bitcoin treasury company. On his podcast, he shared a clip in which market analyst Jordi Visser explains why the youth lean toward socialism. Frustration and the feeling that the system is failing them are to blame. Visser, however, sees that Bitcoin may be the way out–something that is missing from Mamdani’s platform.
In the same video, Pompliano shares the text from a venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, who cites student debt, unaffordable housing, long-term negative capital, no stake in the capitalist system, and the lack of eagerness of the boomer generation to pass the power to younger generations.
Interestingly, Pompliano suggests that the solution for the youth would be copying the behavior of successful people of the past: accumulating capital, embracing new technologies, and taking risks–diving into the Bitcoin space matches all three suggestions. However, it only emphasizes that the old-school pipeline of the American Dream is systematically broken, and Bitcoin is one of the newer bypasses in the post-2008-and-2020-crises world order.
Gemini exchange co-founder Tyler Winklevoss made a viral post condemning the youth supporting Mamdani. He concluded that socialism can be a hard lesson for Zoomers and millennials to learn why socialism is a bad idea.
However, many in the comment section pointed out that instead of speaking about how good it is for New Yorkers to “learn it the hard way,” Winklevoss could come up with a more positive program, for instance, educating the youth about dangers of socialism the same way Mamdani earned his popularity–via social media, or just through “throwing good money at [capitalism] to work outside your trust fund.”
Conclusion
New York is home to Gemini, MoonPay, Circle, Paxos, and other cryptocurrency projects. The mayor of the city will have an impact on the crypto industry of the U.S., per se. The probable victory of Mamdani casts a shadow on the prospects of the cryptocurrency business in New York, as the crypto sector is nonexistent in his campaign. It’s four months until the November election, and things can change.
