Ian Calderon Runs for California Governor, Vows to Make State ‘Undisputed Leader’ on Bitcoin

Ian Calderon, a Democrat and former California Legislature majority leader, announced his candidacy for governor Bitcoin At the heart of national policy.

“California has always been a technology leader. Now is the time for us to return to our roots and make California an uncontroversial leader in Bitcoin,” Calderon said. Tweet Tuesday.

Calderon was a solid supporter of digital assets; confirmation Once elected, he will support state program crypto payments livestream early on the same day as “Make sure you have Bitcoin on your balance sheet.”

Another thing Campaign VideoCalderon compared his positioning to the current situation.

“My generation pays bills on our phones, we send each other money with Benmo and we save on Bitcoin,” Calderon said. “But the people who run our government are trying to use yesterday’s ideas to solve today’s problems, but it’s not working.”

“Ambitional and bold”

Calderon’s statement is not without the weight and the work behind it.

After three terms, he left Congress in 2020 and continued to work in the policy field. work In 2022, the Sato Action Fund investigated the laws that considered Bitcoin to be the state’s fiat currency. Calderon is also cited as a contributor to the 2020 roadmap developed by the California Blockchain Working Group, the forum that created policy proposals on digital assets.

Much earlier in 2018, we created the California Blockchain Working Group, assessing the uses, risks, benefits and legal impact of technology on state governments and businesses, defining blockchains for law, and developing policy recommendations that include potential amendments to state law.

Calderon’s stance “indicating that Crypto has entered the mainstream, indicating that candidates have been made mainstream as they are openly executed on the procrypt platform and compete with each other,” said Robert Boris Mofrad, co-founder of blockchain data storage company Serenity. Decryption.

However, it remains unclear whether the position is adopted or received “by the masses,” Mofrad noted. “But what we can understand is that code is a serious part of the political conversation and that it started at the federal level with the idea of ​​creating a reserve.”

“California is a very ambitious and bold position to put Bitcoin on its balance sheet,” Mohrad said. “The situation is different when it comes to states like California, the fifth largest economy in the world.”

He added that such proposals are “hard to manage responsibly by the state’s Treasury,” as the government “usually treats Bitcoin as an intangible asset,” and therefore “records all losses in value, but cannot actually record profits.”

California and the Cryptocurrency

Calderon’s campaign will weigh California progressively through two important legal frameworks.

In AB 1180, certain state agencies can test payments for stable coins for fees that began in 2026, while AB 1052 brings cryptography under the state’s unclaimed property laws by requiring that inactive custody accounts be transferred to the state and retained in their original form.

However, neither measure allows California to directly purchase or hold Bitcoin, making a clear distinction from Calderon’s proposal.