Andrew Yang Wants to Make Forward Party the "Crypto Party"

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The founder and leader of the Forward Party and presidential candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party primaries says that he sees the Forward Party as the “Crypto Party.”

Andrew Yang: Cryptocurrency is a Path to UBI

Andrew Yang believes the values of the Forward Party and the crypto community are deeply aligned.

On the latest Bankless podcast, the Forward Party founder expressed strong support for the crypto industry, saying he wants to make the Forward Party the “Crypto Party” and help legislators realize that crypto is “a force for progress, a force for innovation, a massive provider of jobs.” He said:

“I want to make the Forward Party the Crypto Party, truly. Because I see the alignment as very, very deep. The parallels are so strong, where you have this system, you can say the political or the financial system, and you see that it’s failing and failing in its various ways, and then you say ‘OK, maybe we can do better’.”

Yang is an American entrepreneur, attorney, and politician who stood as a Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential and 2021 New York City mayoral primaries. Earlier this month, Yang founded the Forward Party, a political action committee that seeks to form a political party that will ease the political polarization and reform the U.S. political and economic systems.

Yang now wants the Forward Party to become a political force that stands for rational regulation of cryptocurrencies. “I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that you can do your own thing entirely. There will have to be some regulation,” he said on the Bankless podcast, “but you want to do it the right way, the intelligent way.”

Rule of thumb – when faced with a trillion dollar industry that could define the future try not to screw it up.

— Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) October 7, 2021

Politicians respond to resources and incentives, Yang said, claiming that this is what the crypto industry should focus on in the immediate future. “Lobbying works,” he said, insisting the industry needed to dedicate money and resources in order to skew the authorities’ incentives in favor of crypto.

During the 2020 presidential elections, Yang popularized the idea of universal basic income (UBI), a financial transfer concept where all citizens of a given population regularly receive a set and equal amount of money from the government without a means test. However, when he tried to test UBI on a smaller scale, he ran into problems with banks. 

“The banking system is broken,” he stated, arguing that cryptocurrencies could be a much better way of distributing UBI. He said:

“Cryptocurrency is one path to UBI. When I talk to people in the cryptocurrency community, some of them love the idea of alleviating poverty through cryptocurrency. You can get that resource in people’s hands much more seemingly, and you can do it via different digital currencies or tokens. So there are a lot of people working in that direction.”

Yang also said that he believes the crypto community is a “sleeping giant” that could achieve significant targets if it focused in any particular direction. However, he thinks the community needs an ambassador to “humanize” the industry before the public’s eyes. He said:

“If you want to convert people’s perception of the crypto community, you’re going to need a human being, an ambassador, who then goes out there and pounds the message and conveys the qualities you want to be conveyed in a way that will humanize both the community and the industry.”

Yang has been an avid supporter of the crypto industry for some time. During the 2021 mayoral primaries, he promised to make New York City a Bitcoin and crypto hub if he was elected mayor. He also accepted crypto donations as part of his 2020 presidential campaign.

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