Jesse Powell has a lot on his plate. He is helping the crypto industry flex its newfound influence in Washington, DC, and Kraken, the crypto exchange he founded in 2011, is planning to go public next year. But as he pulls up a chair at a San Francisco coffee shop, what’s top of mind for Powell is not politics or business. It’s real estate. He wants to talk about the gorgeous white tower known to locals as ‘Susie’s Building’ that was built in the 1920’s—and whose residents don’t want Powell to live there.
“It’s right around the corner, I can show it to you,” says Powell eagerly, waving his arm in the direction of the 12-story Pacific Heights building that offers sumptuous views of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay.
Powell has made an all-cash offer for a ninth floor apartment, but some owners in the co-op building are blocking the sale. They haven’t publicly explained why, but it’s a safe bet their reasons are based on Powell’s identity: He is a longtime Bitcoin advocate who likes to share political views on social media that many in this famously liberal city find abhorrent.
Powell and his fight with the co-op owners—who he is now suing—is a fitting symbol for the crypto industry as a whole right now. Despite their bulging fortunes and newfound political clout, crypto leaders are still struggling for the sort of respectability long enjoyed by bankers and other financial professionals. And even as he pushes to be part of the mainstream, Powell is also a bridge to crypto’s past—one of a dwindling number of figures who came up in the industry’s wild frontier days.
A Trumper among liberals
“I think Trump is the best candidate we could have come up with. He’s kept his promises to crypto,” says Powell, who donated $1 million to the President’s election campaign, and says he is pleased by the White House’s executive actions.
Plenty of people may share his opinion, but you won’t find many of them in this upscale San Francisco coffee shop, where other patrons are enjoying oatmeal lattes and attending to well-coiffed dogs. In this setting, right wing political views are about as welcome as a Prius at the Sturgis Biker rally.
Powell also expresses his conservative views on social media, where he has issued abrasive broadsides about the merits of DEI and other liberal ideals. In person, though, he is polite and soft-spoken—the sort of person, in fact, who could make an ideal neighbor. When it comes to his current real estate predicament, Powell’s decision to sue his would-be fellow co-op members is unlikely to improve their opinion of him. But he insists he had no choice after being unfairly blackballed.
Powell notes that, despite supplying four reference letters along with his all-cash offer, the co-op members rebuffed him outright, refusing to even speak with him. He believes this likely due to his political views and his work in crypto. It’s a reasonable conclusion, especially given that the owner of the building’s penthouse is a big time Democratic fund-raiser who has hosted the likes of Kamala Harris, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. For Powell, he is a victim of discrimination plain and simple.
Powell’s lawsuit against the co-op cites violations of the federal Fair Housing Act and California’s Civil Rights Act—two laws whose passage came about due to pressure from, well, liberals. I ask if he sees any irony in this. Powell does not.
“I completely agree with the existence of the laws since with housing you have a problem with a natural monopoly of the land,” says Powell, noting that San Francisco, like other cities, once engaged in racist housing practices like red-lining and block-busting.
Powell is claiming discrimination based on his profession and his beliefs, not his race, but—if his allegations are true, he may have a point his would-be neighbors’ position is based on “we don’t want your kind around here.”
A lawyer for the co-op board who represents the building’s residents did not respond to a request for comment.
If Powell prevails, his arrival in the co-op would likely add an element of class, as well as political, diversity. The Kraken founder is not from old money, but grew up in the hardscrabble Central Valley town of Stockton where his family at times had to rely on welfare and food stamps—though today he is incredibly rich and owns a place in the posh Brentwood section of Los Angeles. And while his lawsuit against the co-op is very much personal, it also reflects the ascendence of new political forces that are challenging longtime progressive dominance in the Bay Area.
Twilight of crypto’s old guard
If San Francisco is changing, so too is the crypto world. At a time when the President is talking up a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and crypto executives are roaming the White House and Congress, it’s easy to forget how very different the industry looked in 2011 when Powell started Kraken.
Back then, almost no one outside Silicon Valley had heard of Bitcoin, and most of those who had dismissed it as a fad or a scam. And unlike the polished executives and lawyers who speak for crypto today, the face of the industry was dominated by larger than life characters such as Roger “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver and the dashing Argentine, Wences Casares, whose firm Xapo touted a secret vault to store digital coins under a mountain in Switzerland.
Today, only Powell and a handful of figures from Bitcoin’s early days are still active in the industry, while the rest are enjoying low-key retirements or, in some cases, serving prison sentences. In many cases, they have been replaced in the public eye by Washington, DC insiders or executives from Wall Street firms like BlackRock, which have embraced crypto in the last few years.
This change has also coincided with the crypto industry becoming part of the political establishment in the U.S. and elsewhere—a far cry from the radical mistrust of government set out by Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. I ask Powell if the intellectual energy and idealism that marked crypto’s early days has diminished, and he concedes it has, but that he says that’s in part because much of Nakamoto’s original vision has come to pass.
“The original ideal was to get Bitcoin to the world, and we’ve achieved a lot of that, opening access to people who have been unbanked by the formal financial system,” says Powell, a philosophy major who lists Aristotle and (unsurprisingly) Ayn Rand among his favorite thinkers.
He adds, though, that the quest to legitimize crypto is not over, warning that another change in U.S. government could hamstring the industry again. Powell also points to Kraken’s struggles in places like the United Kingdom, where he complains of a draconian warning regime for crypto customers: “They want your welcome screen to look like a pack of cigarettes—if they could put dead babies on it, they would.”
It’s clear that Powell is very much being part of the daily hurly-burly that goes with running the company, even though he stepped down as CEO in 2023. At the time, he framed the decision as a desire to focus on other things in life but now he admits it was to protect Kraken from growing regulatory heat. In particular, he had learned he had become subject to a criminal investigation, and wanted to avoid having to make disclosure requirements that would have complicated the firm’s global licensing efforts.
His return to a hands-on role at Kraken, where he is Chairman, can also be seen as taking care of unfinished business. According to a Bloomberg report, this includes having the exchange follow its longtime competitor Coinbase into the public markets, with an IPO planned for early next year. And while Kraken’s battles with the U.S. government are receding—the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its case against the exchange this month—that is not the case for Powell personally.
In 2023, as part of an investigation into a dispute between Powell and an arts non-profit he founded, the FBI raided his home and seized his devices. Though the exact circumstances of the raid remain murky, Powell is confident he will be exonerated, an outcome that will come as a personal vindication—and a chance to regain access to stashes of crypto he has stored on the devices. If that comes to pass, and he prevails in his battle with the co-op, Powell will have some spare cash to decorate the walls of his new San Francisco apartment. And crypto fans will have another story to tell about one of the industry’s early icons.
