Texas Senator Takes Advantage of Bitcoin Dip
The United States Republican senator Rafael “Ted” Cruz, who hails from Texas, has a reputation for talking a big game. This time around, he may have something to show for it.
A financial disclosure filed on Friday, February 4th, showed that the Texas senator put his money where his mouth is by buying between $15,000 to $50,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC). River Financial, a San Franciso-based financial institution dedicated to harnessing Bitcoin’s transformative possibilities, brokered the sale on January 25th.
Source: United States Senate Financial Disclosures
At the time of the sale, trading prices for BTC were between $36,000 and $37,000. However, the ensuing days showed a rise in BTC prices, leading to around $41,600. Supposing Senator Cruz hasn’t sold his BTCs and incurred short-term capital gains taxes, he would be profiting somewhere between $2,000 to $6,850 on the transaction.
Texas has benefited from an incursion of BTC mining companies, prompting interest in the subject to expand to epic proportions. Hence, following the example of Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, Senator Cruz has spent much of the latter half of the cryptocurrency bull run allying himself with the blockchain and digital assets industry.
Senator Cruz has pushed for gift shops and vending machines in the U.S. Capitol complex to accept cryptocurrency payments. He likewise opposed a stipulation in the latest infrastructure bill, which critics imply would broaden the definition of a ‘broker’ to miners, even validators and coders in theory.
At the height of the current cold spell swamping the state of Texas, several cryptocurrency miners either slowed down or halted operations to protect the state’s energy grid infrastructure, having already failed during a lengthy freeze in 2021. Cruz himself was notably missing for much of that period as he was apparently in the resort town of Cancún, Mexico.
Incidentally, River Financial, a licensed brokerage in several U.S. states, does not mention a Texas Money Transmitter license on its website. However, as per the Texas Department of Banking Guidance on Virtual Currencies, “no currency exchange license is required in Texas to conduct any type of transaction exchanging virtual with sovereign currencies.”
Several members of the U.S. Congress have revealed investments in cryptocurrency or related stocks, including Massachusetts’ Jake Auchincloss and Illinois’ Marie Newman of the Democratic Party and New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew and Alabama’s Barry Moore, who are both Republicans.