(Bloomberg) — Blake Masters is using his Republican primary campaign for Arizona Senate to evangelize for cryptocurrency, calling it “the biggest innovation of the century so far” and vowing to fight regulatory efforts on digital currency.
“I’m genuinely a crypto enthusiast. I think it’s cool at the technological level,” he said after a campaign appearance in Flagstaff this month. In an interview, he talked about his latest crypto obsession, the NFTs he minted for his campaign, and how his belief in Bitcoin sprang out of his support for the gold standard-driven presidential campaign of Ron Paul.
Masters is running in the GOP primary to replace Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. He’s currently in third place, according to a poll by OH Predictive Insights, but says he hopes a potential endorsement from former President Donald Trump could catapult him to the lead.
He’s a protege of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and president of the Thiel Foundation. In Ohio’s Republican U.S. Senate primary, JD Vance, another Thiel-backed candidate, recently received Trump’s endorsement and he’s subsequently jumped in polls.
The 35-year-old Masters co-wrote the best-selling startup management book “Zero to One,” based on his notes from a class Thiel taught at Stanford University.
Masters created an NFT of that book, made 99 copies and gave them to people who contributed the maximum of $5,800 to his campaign. He’s looking to do more blockchain-inspired fundraising in the future. “We’re in novel fundraising mode, right?” he says. “I think that value only came from doing it once. We have like a second version and it’s totally different.”
“Some stuff is just frothy,” he says. “We’ll see what a Bored Ape costs in about 10 years,” referring to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 NFTs by Yuga Labs LLC, popular with celebrities and crypto enthusiasts.
Masters doesn’t have a Bored Ape, but he’s excited about his Chain Runner, an art-based NFT randomly generated and stored on the blockchain. He pulls up his coin wallet on his phone — he has a balance worth more than $2,000, but it changes as he talks — and shows Runner #9452, an eye-patch-wearing, cigarette smoking avatar.
“I think I paid like $2,500 bucks for this. I could probably sell it for like $4,000,” he says. “There’s a community of people that are interested in something and kind of telling a story, and that’s where the value is. Whereas like, you know, my wife who doesn’t know anything about this stuff, she’s like, you paid — you paid what for that?”
(Updates fourth paragraph with details of Thiel endorsements; an earlier version corrected the spelling of Yuga Labs in the seventh paragraph)
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