What about crypto?
One area notably absent from Suarez’s announcement video, however, was his embrace of cryptocurrency. Suarez was among the most vocal US politicians in 2021 singing crypto’s praises, with a stated goal of transforming Miami into the world’s first Web3 city. The mayor briefly explored paying residents dividends from a municipal “bitcoin yield.” At one point, Suarez even proposed giving municipal workers in the city the option to get paid and pay their taxes in Bitcoin. Suarez himself also revealed he would accept 100% of his own government salary in bitcoin.
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“My wife asked me if that was a good idea, but certainly when governments are spending that kind of money that they are, when you have inflation at the point that it is, when you have rampant overspending in government and deficit spending, all of that pushes in favor of an increase in the price of Bitcoin,” Suarez told Fox News in a November 2021 interview.
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Though it’s hard to say what effect those antics had on driving up actual cryptocurrency adoption in the city, it did lead to a hefty inflow of new campaign donations sent by wealthy tech investors. The pandering also led to an influx of boom-time crypto capital into the city. In maybe the clearest example of this, Miami-Dade officials in 2021 signed a 19-year $135 million naming rights agreement with FTX to make the now disgraced cryptocurrency exchange the face of the Miami Heat’s basketball stadium. The stadium revoked that name last year following FTX’s sudden collapse and its founder’s criminal indictment.
Saurez hasn’t disavowed cryptocurrencies, but he also isn’t mentioning it with the same level of frequent glee as he once did. The cryptocurrency industry experienced possibly the worst downturn in its brief history last year thanks to the collapse of multiple exchanges, criminal indictments, and more than a handful of lost fortunes. Suarez’s own Bitcoin salary took a plunge last year when the price of Bitcoin tanked by as much as 40% in a two-month span. The mayor still stands by the salary decision but he, like other crypto evangelists politicians, has since taken his foot off the Bitcoin hype accelerator.
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“My salary is actually up,” Suarez assured CNBC in January. “It’s actually been a pretty good investment!”
Suarez enters the 2024 Republican presidential primary race less than one week after the front runner, former President Donald Trump, was indicted by a federal grand jury on criminal charges related to his improper storage of classified White House documents. So far, the list of contenders hoping to steal Trump’s chokehold on the party is already a dozen strong and includes Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former Vice President Mike Pence, and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott along with a handful of wishful longshots.
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