Jonathan Herzog, a crypto advocate and former aide at Yang's campaign, has launched his congressional run for New York's 10th District. The 26-year-old started off on a positive tone towards cryptocurrencies and has since signaled that the future is decentralized and open source.

Herzog announced his intentions to vie for the NY-10 Rep seat back in 2019, becoming more vocal about cryptocurrencies in the recent past. Though trailing against Jerry Nadler, a Democrat who has held the seat for 28 years, Herzog is determined to see a legal framework developed for the crypto ecosystem,

“There’s acute urgency to ensure that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have mass adoption and have a regulatory framework that enables their innovation in New York and in the United States.”

The young democrat is quite vocal on twitter; in fact, one of his tweets on May 23 notes that it's time for a Bitcoin-friendly representative,

“Time for a representative who knows what Bitcoin is.”

In a phone interview with Coindesk, Herzog went on to highlight that Wyoming's advancement in crypto regulation should be replicated at the Federal level. In his opinion, this can be done by bringing stakeholders like Jack Dorsey and Caitlin Long to the table in order to circumvent the underlying issues with informed guidance.

Herzog was also keen to mention that New York's BitLicense basically chased away crypto innovations from the big apple. Dubbing Bitcoin as a tool that can bank the unbanked, Herzog says that it would have qualified as a good approach to combat COVID-19,

“Bitcoin is part and parcel of civil rights fights to bank the unbanked and to offer a real decentralized alternative to the fact that even before COVID-19 nearly half of all Americans couldn’t afford an unexpected $500 bill.”

Looking at Herzog's main ideologies, the NY-10 Rep contestant is pretty close to what Yang advocated for during his presidential run in the Democratic primaries. Like Yang, Herzog believes in Universal Basic Income (UBI) especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. He echoes that it is in times of crisis that ideas which seem politically impossible could become viable,

“This crisis has only underpinned and accelerated the urgency and need of universal basic income, but also the need for the internet of money, for a decentralized, blockchain-enabled, Bitcoin/crypto solution.”

Notably, Yang was also an advocate for crypto ecosystems and it, therefore, comes as no surprise that one of his campaign aides subscribes to the same school of thought.

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