Vivek Ramaswamy’s bitcoin problem is not the ordinary kind. Plenty of candidates own stock in industries they would regulate. What makes the Republican nominee for governor different is that his position is leveraged — and the bill he has praised would point Ohio’s retirement money at the exact asset his leverage rides on.
Start with the instrument. House Bill 18, the Ohio Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve Act, is described almost everywhere as a bill that would let Ohio put 10% of certain funds into crypto. That description is half right, and the missing half is the part that matters.
The 10% ceiling applies to the treasurer of state. Under the bill, the treasurer could invest interim money from the general revenue fund, the rainy-day fund and the lottery’s deferred prizes trust in digital assets, capped in the aggregate at a tenth of the fund balance at the time of purchase. The bill also restricts what qualifies: the asset must be an exchange-traded product whose average market capitalization over the preceding twelve months is at least $750 billion. Bitcoin, at roughly $1.33 trillion, clears that bar comfortably. Ether, at about $233 billion, does not. The bill never says the word “bitcoin.” It does not need to.
The pension provisions are built differently. Rather than authorize a capped allocation, the bill amends the investment sections governing all five of Ohio’s retirement systems to declare that nothing in those sections prohibits a board from investing in a qualifying exchange-traded product. It is a permission slip, not a budget line. There is no percentage limit written into the pension language. There is no market-cap floor attached to it either.
That distinction has been lost in the coverage, including in the widely repeated estimate that HB 18 would open the door to $27.5 billion in public money. That figure comes from applying the treasurer’s 10% cap to pension assets. The bill text does no such thing. Ohio’s five systems held roughly $284 billion as of Jan. 1, 2026, according to the Ohio Retirement Study Council, and the statutory ceiling on how much of it could go into bitcoin funds under this bill is not 10%. It is whatever eleven trustees decide is prudent.
What Ramaswamy actually owns
Ramaswamy co-founded Strive in Ohio as an anti-ESG asset manager. It is now headquartered in Dallas, and it is a bitcoin treasury company — a firm whose central business is accumulating bitcoin and measuring itself against bitcoin. Matt Cole is chairman and chief executive. Ramaswamy holds no executive role; his most recent securities filing lists his occupation simply as entrepreneur.
He remains one of its largest shareholders. His latest amended Schedule 13D, filed June 1 and reflecting positions as of May 28, reports beneficial ownership of 5,693,897 shares assuming conversion of his Class B stock — 7.6% of the class. That is down from 8.8% six weeks earlier, diluted by the company’s continuous at-the-market share issuance. At Monday’s close of $12.16, the stake is worth roughly $69 million. A separate family trust reported 1,418,942 shares in an earlier filing, and an investment company he controls holds another 106,245.
His April financial disclosure to the Ohio Ethics Commission also shows he personally holds bitcoin and ether.
Here is where leverage enters. Strive does not merely hold bitcoin; it funds bitcoin purchases by issuing perpetual preferred stock that pays a dividend every business day at a 13% annualized rate, with a redemption value and liquidation preference of $783 million as of June 30. Preferred holders stand ahead of common shareholders. That structure is designed to amplify: when bitcoin rises, the gain accrues disproportionately to the common equity Ramaswamy owns, because the preferred claim is fixed. When bitcoin falls, the same math runs in reverse.
It has been running in reverse. Strive reported Monday that it lost $257.6 million in the second quarter, with 94.1% of that loss attributable to markdowns on its bitcoin and a preferred-stock position. Six-month losses came to $523.5 million. Accumulated deficit stands at $1.04 billion. At June 30 the company held 19,864 bitcoin acquired at a weighted average cost of $94,793 apiece — against a fair value of $58,631 per coin. The cost basis was $1.88 billion. The holding was worth $1.16 billion. The gap was $718.3 million.
Bitcoin has recovered since, closing near $65,000 on Monday. That still leaves Strive’s position roughly a third below what it paid. For the company to break even on the bitcoin it already owns, the price would need to rise about 46% from here.
Large institutional buying is one of the things that moves that price. A state deciding to allocate even a modest fraction of a quarter-trillion dollars would be exactly that kind of buyer — and the announcement effect alone tends to arrive before the first purchase settles.
The levers a governor holds
Ohio’s governor does not run the pension funds, and it is worth being precise about what the office actually controls. The governor appoints one investment-expert trustee to each of the five retirement boards. On four of those five boards, an appointed trustee holds the seat through the end of a four-year term.
The teachers’ system is the exception, and it became the exception recently. The state budget signed in June 2025 and effective Sept. 30 rewrote the composition of the State Teachers Retirement System board. Elected educators, who once held seven of eleven seats, now hold three. The director of education and workforce and the chancellor of higher education — both governor appointees who serve in the governor’s cabinet or at the governor’s pleasure — sit on the board or send designees. And the budget added a sentence that appears nowhere in the law governing the other four systems: every appointed member of the teachers’ board serves at the pleasure of the appointing authority.
An appointee who can be removed at will is a different kind of appointee. That change was made in a budget bill, not in standalone pension legislation, and it was made before anyone knew who would win this November. But it is the law a new governor inherits.
The treasurer’s office matters at least as much. Under HB 18 the treasurer, not the governor, decides whether the state buys crypto at all. Treasurer Robert Sprague has been the loudest official voice for Ohio’s crypto push — “We chose to lead instead of follow,” he said last fall — and he was asked directly about being Ramaswamy’s running mate. “I don’t know about that,” he answered. “But I can say this: I think Vivek is a bold innovator, and he’s looking at the future of the state.” Sprague, now running for secretary of state, said he owns no digital assets himself. Ramaswamy ultimately chose Senate President Rob McColley.
Where the money came from
Ramaswamy has never hidden his enthusiasm. In January 2025, while still co-leading the federal Department of Government Efficiency, he called HB 18 “a thoughtful & powerful bill” and urged Ohio to “think creatively about hedging against government-created inflation risks.” Speaking at the Bitcoin Policy Institute two months later, he framed the asset in almost civic terms: bitcoin, he said, “helps fill that void, fill that hunger for a symbol, a reminder of what American greatness was all about.”
The industry has returned the affection. V-PAC, the super PAC supporting his candidacy, has raised roughly $42 million, and a handful of donors account for most of it. Federal filings show Pennsylvania trading magnate Jeff Yass gave $20 million across three checks. Ross Stevens gave $6 million; he founded Stone Ridge and, in 2017, NYDIG, a bitcoin-only financial services firm. Ratmir Timashev and Elon Musk gave $5 million apiece, and Bill Ackman gave $1 million.
To the candidate’s own committee, TiffinOhio.net reported in June that founders of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, their spouses and the chief executive of a major stablecoin company routed roughly $116,000 in maximum-legal contributions to Ramaswamy’s campaign, nearly all of it on primary day or the morning after.
None of that is illegal, and Ohio’s ethics statute says so explicitly: absent bribery or a purpose to defraud, campaign contributions are treated as accruing to a candidate in the ordinary course. The point is not that the money bought a position. Ramaswamy held this position before the checks arrived. The point is that the people writing them understood what they were buying access to.
The case against alarm
Several things cut the other way, and they deserve to be said plainly.
HB 18 has gone nowhere. It received five hearings in the House Technology and Innovation Committee and has never been reported out. Speaker Matt Huffman, a Republican, has been openly cold to it: “I think these kinds of risky things, we need to have a long, hard look at… I’m still scratching my head over cryptocurrency,” he told reporters last fall. House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn was blunter: “We have to be very careful with the crypto industry. We’ve seen a lot of abuse; Because of a lack of oversight, we’ve seen a lot of people losing their livelihoods.”
The retirement boards are also not free agents. Ohio law requires trustees to discharge their duties solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries, and to diversify investments so as to minimize the risk of large losses. A heavy allocation to a single volatile asset would sit uneasily against that standard, and trustees who tried it would be exposed. Ohio’s pension boards have lately been moving toward less exotic exposure, not more — the public employees’ system spent last year trimming its private equity holdings over fees and performance.
And Ramaswamy has been accused of nothing. He has not been charged, investigated, or found to have violated any rule. Backing legislation that happens to align with your portfolio is legal in Ohio, and common. Nothing in the state’s ethics chapter requires a governor to divest anything or to place assets in a blind trust. That is the actual gap: not a rule he has broken, but a rule that does not exist.
Why this is different from the data centers
Ramaswamy’s investments across the data center industry he would regulate raise a conventional conflict: he owns companies that benefit from policies he favors. The crypto position is sharper for three reasons.
First, it is directional and single-asset. A data center portfolio has many moving parts. A bitcoin treasury company has one. Second, it is leveraged, which means a given move in the underlying asset lands harder on his equity than on a plain holder’s. Third, and most important, it is currently underwater by hundreds of millions of dollars — which means the policy in question is not a way to grow a comfortable position. It is a way to close a hole.
We have written before about the echo of Coingate, the scandal in which Ohio workers’ compensation money flowed into rare coins controlled by a politically connected insider. The comparison has real limits: Coingate was theft, bitcoin is openly priced on public exchanges, and no one is alleging anything criminal here. But the structural lesson survives the differences. Ohio has been burned before when public money was steered toward a volatile asset class in which politically connected people already held positions.
The remedy available to Ramaswamy is not complicated, and it is entirely within his control. He could commit to divesting the Strive stake and the personal crypto holdings before taking office, or to a genuinely blind trust. He has not been asked to do so by any law, because Ohio has no such law. Voters get to decide on Tuesday, Nov. 3 whether that is good enough.
