Who is Mike Belshe, the cryptocurrency executive hosting JD Vance fundraiser in Palo Alto?

Tech entrepreneur Mike Belshe was set to host vice presidential contender Ohio Sen. JD Vance for his second fundraising visit to the Bay Area on Monday in his Palo Alto home.

Belshe is one of several tech executives who have come out in support of the GOP ticket or have helped in their efforts to raise more cash.

Vance worked closely early on in his career in venture capital in San Francisco with venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and counts billionaire investor Marc Andreessen and Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk as among his tech industry connections.

Donald Trump’s Republican vice presidential pick is hoping to use his Silicon Valley connections to bolster the war chest of the Republican presidential campaign.

And the tickets to the fundraiser come at a steep price. A $25,000 donation per person includes participation in the roundtable, a photo and dinner with the vice presidential candidate. For $15,000, attendees can get a photo and dinner, while $3,300 allows participation in the dinner only.

Last time Vance, known for his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” about his Appalachian roots, was in the Bay Area in June, he helped raise $12 million at the San Francisco home of billionaire tech entrepreneur David Sacks.

The announcement that Belshe, a crypto executive, would host Vance for the fundraiser should come as no surprise. Trump has positioned himself as a pro-crypto president if he were to be elected for another term.

According to a Newsweek report, the former president spoke at a cryptocurrency conference on Saturday, making five major promises to the cryptocurrency industry. These promises included fighting inflation with crypto-friendly policies, encouraging the use of excess energy for cryptocurrency mining, and firing a government official viewed as anti-crypto.

Here are five things to know about Belshe:

— Belshe is the CEO and co-founder of BitGo, a pioneering cryptocurrency wallet, digital asset trust and security company based in Palo Alto. The company was founded in 2013 by Belshe and Ben Davenport, a former software engineer with Google and Facebook. BitGo’s valuation was pegged at $1.75 billion last year after securing Series C funding.

— As a computer engineer, Belshe helped program the SPDY protocol, which made web browsing faster, and authored HTTP/2.0, which allowed websites to communicate with users’ web browsers more efficiently.

— Belshe began his tech career as a software engineer at Hewlett Packard in 1993 before joining Netscape in 1995, where he worked on the Netscape Enterprise server.

— He is an alumnus of California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, graduating in 1993. According to his LinkedIn profile, Belshe was voted “Computer Science Senior of the Year.”

— Belshe has been posting political content on his X account over the past month. On July 27, two days before the fundraiser, he posted this pro-cryptocurrency quote from Trump: “Bitcoin is not a threat to the US dollar. They have it backwards. The US government is the biggest threat to the US dollar.”

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Originally Published: July 29, 2024 at 4:12 p.m.