On Nov. 5, a few dozen Bitcoiners, MAGA-hat wearers and curious locals gathered to watch the election results come in at PubKey, a Bitcoin-themed bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. A digital display on the wall showed the price of Bitcoin, which ticked past $73,000 as favorable news came in for Donald Trump . The tallies looked increasingly good, too, for Bernie Moreno , an Ohio Republican trying to unseat Senator Sherrod Brown , who’d called for hearings on crypto’s use by terrorists. Moreno was backed by $40 million from crypto companies.

At 10:30 p.m., the organizer of a Bitcoin meetup group called out that the odds of a Trump victory on the crypto gambling site Polymarket had reached 88%. “Bitcoin’s pumping, dude!” he yelled. “You should buy it before it goes to a million.”