Despite the fervor surrounding former president Donald Trump's campaign to woo the crypto community, Ethereum and Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson has criticized the Trump family’s decision to wade into the crypto space.

“Trump is launching a DeFi application, and that’s scary to me as an industry, because everything Trump does the left hates with such a passion,” Charles Hoskinson told the Financial Times. “He’s taken a bipartisan thing and he’s making it partisan.”

Trump's presidential campaign began accepting donations in crypto earlier this year, during a time when the incumbent Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration was viewed as potentially less favorable to the crypto sector.

Since then, Harris has publicly pledged to support innovation in the crypto and artificial intelligence industries, allowing her to earn a "B" grade on digital assets from the advocacy group Stand With Crypto.

Despite billing crypto a "scam," Trump has also embraced the digital assets sector in recent months, thanks to an infusion of crypto campaign donations. This summer, he claimed the industry had donated $25 million to his 2024 presidential bid.

Hoskinson is not the sole figure in the crypto industry railing against naked support of pro-crypto candidates or the entry of politics into crypto. Earlier this summer, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin exhorted the digital assets community to look beyond superficial support and assess where genuine, long-term commitment lies: “The game of politics is much more complicated than just ‘who wins the next election’, and there are a lot of levers that your words and actions affect,” Buterin said.

“There is a particular style of being ‘crypto-friendly’ that is common to authoritarian governments, that is worth being wary of," Buterin explained. “In particular, by publicly giving the impression that you support ‘pro-crypto’ candidates just because they are ‘pro-crypto’, you are helping to create an incentive gradient where politicians come to understand that all they need to get your support is to support ‘crypto."