Zohran Mamdani’s win has put New York’s crypto sector on edge, raising questions about how a mayor critical of both Wall Street and digital-asset wealth will steer the city.
On Nov. 4, the 34-year-old Democrat defeated former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in a race that had gripped prediction markets for months.
Mamdani’s ascent is historic as he became NYC’s youngest mayor in a century, its first Muslim, first South Asian, and first African-born leader.
Meanwhile, his win was part of a broader Democratic wave across the country, as multiple candidates ran aggressively against President Donald Trump’s policies and drew strong support from younger, more diverse voters.
But it was also a windfall for users of the largest decentralized prediction platform, Polymarket. More than $430 million flowed into the Mamdani market, with 92% of bets backing him.
Yet for the crypto industry watching from New York and beyond, his victory represents something far more complex than a single electoral outcome.
Mamdani is not a conventional crypto ally, unlike outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, who once deposited his first three paychecks in Bitcoin and established the nation’s first mayoral office for digital assets.
Instead, he arrives with a political record rooted in consumer protection, critiques of crypto excess, and a commitment to economic redistribution.
Considering this, his rise has split the crypto world down a philosophical fault line between those who fear his policies and those who see in him a faint echo of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original ethos.
Crypto’s conflicted position
Before his win, the loudest alarm came from prominent crypto figures who see Mamdani as a threat to wealth and investment in America’s most important financial hub.
Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder of Gemini, argued that Mamdani is backed by “spoiled, educated university students” who, in his view, “never learned the value of Western civilization.”
He added:
“The Wall Streeters, financiers, and hedge funders have been too busy working on their fishponds and climbing the rungs of polite society to remember to protect the system that allowed them to achieve their success in the first place and allowed New York City to once become the greatest city in the world.”
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci had also reportedly warned that Mamdani’s proposed 2% income tax on residents earning over $1 million would trigger a migration of high-income earners and founders.
According to him, this hurts the entire economic ecosystem, as it could result in the potential flight of crypto capital to states with more favorable tax codes.
This suggests that to these crypto advocates, Mamdani’s consumer-protection stance and tax agenda risk weakening New York’s competitive edge at a moment when global crypto markets are restructuring following the FTX, Terra, and BitLicense crises.
That fear is not unfounded, considering New York’s regulatory regime is still one of the strictest in the world, and the city’s status as a crypto hub has been built as much on access to capital and talent as on tech fundamentals.
Yet that perspective tells only half the story.
Because while the city’s wealthiest crypto players brace for higher taxes and tighter rules, a different group of crypto builders and ideological purists see Mamdani not as a threat but as a reflection of crypto’s original anti-gatekeeper philosophy.
The unexpected alignment
For many in the grassroots Web3 community, the irony is striking: crypto’s earliest vision wasn’t about financial speculation, it was about breaking gatekeepers, democratizing economic power, and creating systems that work for people excluded from traditional finance.
And in Mamdani’s rhetoric, they hear faint but clear echoes of that worldview.
Amol G., co-founder of Solana Spaces, put it bluntly: while Mamdani may have “odd socialist tendencies,” he is a product of a system that fails working-class people.
“When Satoshi emerged… the core ethos wasn’t ‘number go up’… it was that people deserve self-determination outside predatory systems. It was to eliminate the coercive gatekeeping middle layers. It was to put the upside, sovereignty, and choice back in the hands of the people, not entrenched power. that is literally the same philosophical DNA.”
Notably, Amol’s statement is not in isolation.
Zack Guzmán, founder of Coinage Media, said Mamdani’s upset mirrored crypto’s founding ethos, while adding that:
“I can understand why people might be afraid of Zohran Mamdani. I can understand why someone wouldn’t want to vote for him. But if you’re in crypto, and you can’t understand why he’s going to win, you should really reconsider why we’re here.”
These voices view Mamdani’s politics of anti-incumbency, anti-gatekeeping, and pro-redistribution not as hostile to crypto but as ideologically adjacent to Bitcoin’s original promise. Not the Bitcoin of ETFs and institutional inflows, but the Bitcoin of cypherpunks, privacy advocates, and early internet idealists.
This is the paradox: the same political instincts that alarm wealthy crypto executives resonate deeply with the movement’s philosophical core.
Mamdani centers the people crypto claims to serve, the unbanked, the financially marginalized, communities of color harmed by predatory finance and fraudulent collapses like FTX and Terra.
In 2023, Mamdani supported a major crypto investor-protection bill, arguing that small investors “are usually the biggest victims” of collapses.
Notably, he criticized Cuomo for advising OKX during an SEC probe. These positions reflect a worldview that views crypto through the lens of public harm and structural inequality, rather than corporate growth.
To his supporters, that makes him principled. However, to his critics, this makes him dangerous.
A defining test for New York and crypto
Following Mamdani’s electoral victory, New York has now become the stage where two visions of crypto collide:
- Crypto as a high-finance industry, integrated with Wall Street, driven by venture capital, friendly to billionaires, and deeply tax-sensitive.
- Crypto, as an anti-establishment technology, is meant to dismantle gatekeepers, redistribute power, and elevate individuals who have failed traditional systems.
Mamdani’s ascent forces the industry to confront the rift between what crypto is today and what it claimed to be at its inception.
So, as Mamdani steps into office by January 2026, he inherits a city still home to the highest concentration of crypto founders, exchanges, institutional desks, and blockchain research labs in the country.
His policies on taxation, compliance, public procurement, and the tech sector will shape New York’s crypto trajectory for the next decade.
The stakes are enormous. A more challenging regulatory environment may accelerate an exodus of crypto wealth and talent.
But a credible consumer-protection framework may also stabilize the market, attract long-term institutional participation, and legitimize New York as the world’s most regulated and most trusted crypto jurisdiction.
In the end, Mamdani’s victory reveals more about the industry confronting him than it does about him.
Crypto now has to ask itself:
“Is it a movement fighting centralized power—or an industry defending the wealth of those who benefited first?”
For a decade, the answer was conveniently both. Under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, that contradiction may finally be impossible to ignore.