Much is known about Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance, notably his past criticism of the Republican presidential nominee, his tough working-class upbringing and his time in the US Marine Corps.

But what interests the business world most is the Ohio senator’s previous career in venture capital and his views on trade — and what they might mean if Trump returns to the White House.

In particular, Mr. Vance has been a strong supporter of cryptocurrency, raising hopes in the sector that a second Trump administration could be positive for the asset class.

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So it is too Trump who in May became the first major presidential candidate to accept donations in crypto assets. He has now accumulated nearly $3 million in such assets — $1.8 million in Bitcoin and $900,000 in Ethereum.

Mr Trump, a longtime cryptocurrency skeptic, spoke last week about his ambitions to support the US cryptocurrency industry.

He told Bloomberg Businessweek: “It’s not going away. It’s amazing.

“If we don’t do this, China will take over and it will take over – or someone else, but probably China. China is very much involved in this.”

It’s no wonder, then, that crypto assets have surged in value – Bitcoin by more than 8% on Monday alone – following the attempted murder last Saturday, Trump was widely seen as something that would boost his chances of victory in November.

The former president chose Mr Vance as his running mate, a strong supporter of cryptocurrencies who has previously reported holdings of Bitcoin worth between $100,000 and $250,000 on the Coinbase platform.

Who is Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance?

Shortly after his nomination as Mr Trump’s running mate, a 2022 video resurfaced showing Mr Vance criticising Gary Gensler, chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), the top US financial regulator.

In the video, from February of that year, Mr. Vance said Mr. Gensler was “the worst person” to be in charge of U.S. financial regulation.

He added: “He wants to inject a lot of politics into the securities business in the US.

“The approach Gary has taken to regulating blockchain and cryptocurrencies is the exact opposite of what it should be.”

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Earlier that month, Mr Vance also tweeted his support for cryptocurrencies as a way to combat government overreach, highlighting how Canada’s finance minister froze the bank accounts of truck drivers protesting COVID lockdowns.

He tweeted: “This is why crypto is taking off. The regime will cut off your access to banking if you have the wrong policies.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Vance also joined other Republican senators in writing to Mr. Gensler to highlight an enforcement action against cryptocurrency miner Debt Box, in which it was later discovered that SEC lawyers used false statements to justify freezing the company’s assets.

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He also voted to reverse accounting guidelines introduced by the SEC that require publicly traded banks to put the digital assets they hold in custody on their balance sheets.

This rule change goes against the convention that bank custody assets are held off-balance sheet and is expected to increase the cost for banks to take custody of crypto assets — and, in all likelihood, dissuade them from doing so. President Biden subsequently vetoed attempts to overturn the rule change.

So with Mr. Vance, the US would have a strongly pro-cryptocurrency vice president.

The Ohio senator would likely be more tech-savvy than any previous US president or vice president.

After law school, he worked at Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm co-founded and backed by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal.

Mr Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s best-known figures, supported Mr Vance’s 2020 bid for the US Senate. Mr Vance later went to work for Revolution, a Washington DC-based venture capital firm, before launching his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, in 2019.

The US news website Axios reported that his backers included Mr Thiel and Marc Andreessen, another of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture capitalists.

Axios said another backer of Narya Capital was Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google. Another longtime backer of Mr. Vance is David Sacks, the former chief executive of the social networking service Yammer and an early-stage investor in successful tech companies including Facebook, Uber, Airbnb and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as well as Palantir Technologies, another well-known tech company co-founded by Mr. Thiel.

In other words, Mr. Vance has impeccable connections in Silicon Valley, which explains why people like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Musk have stepped forward since his appointment to pledge large sums to the Trump campaign.

That’s not to say Mr. Vance is a conventional “tech bro.” He has also suggested in the past that big tech companies have too much power and called for them to be broken up.

He co-authored a paper calling for Google to become a public benefit corporation and praised Lina Khan, the Democratic chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, the top U.S. competition regulator, for her efforts to rein in the tech giants — even as some of her Republican colleagues criticized her for being too aggressive toward them.

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He told a conference in February this year: “I see Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration who I think is actually doing a good job.”

This suggests that Mr. Vance’s approach to technology is far more nuanced than some people realize.

Their attitude, in general, seems to be welcoming to disruptive companies and start-ups and favorable to innovation and competition, but more hostile to technology giants that inhibit consumer choice and, in their own words, are “so obsessed with pricing power within the market that they ignore all the other things that really matter.”

This should make for a fascinating debate with the tech industry if he becomes vice president.

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