Departing NYC Mayor Adams Next Wants to Fix Education, Violence, and Antisemitism with Crypto

Outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams loves crypto. He created a mayoral “Office of Digital Assets and Blockchain,” and supposedly had his first three paychecks converted to bitcoin so the city could even pay him in crypto.

And in remarks made Monday at what was probably his final press conference as mayor, he indicated that his love affair with crypto is only intensifying. In fact, Adams is somehow going to fix violence, education, and antisemitism with crypto, he says.

When speaking about next steps toward the end of the presser, he got off to a rocky start: “I’m excited about the next step. I cannot tell you … I’ve said over and over again, anyone would like to finish a job that you started.” And then he uttered three or four partial sentences I truly could not parse. Then he got his answer back on track with the following:

“I want to do my book. I’m going to go back to school. But I also want to use cryptocurrency to go after violence, educate our children, and really deal with antisemitism that we’re seeing globally. So I’ve always wanted to uplift families and children, and I think this is a great opportunity to use technology to do so. And also I have a great deal of opportunities I’ve always wanted to do.”

What does he mean? Is he turning his time machine back to 2021 and starting a DAO to tackle violence, education, and antisemitism? Is he just donating a bunch of crypto to charities related to those causes? Is he creating his own memecoin? For now, I think it’s best to assume he was just expressing himself artistically at this press conference, and that the statement was a sort of Etsy-style mood board in spoken word form. 

Incidentally, 2025 was an absolutely massive year for lobbying in the crypto industry. According to the Hill, by July of this year no fewer than 27 crypto companies had filed their initial lobbying disclosures. 

Also in July, Politico reported that Coinbase erected branded vending machines on the National Mall and distributed 5,000 Coinbase chocolate bars, with a representative explaining that they were trying to “create a sugar rush for crypto across the Capitol.”

If they’re looking for more ideas like that one—and I truly mean this—they’d be fools to hire anyone other than the inventor of the phrase “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.” And they don’t even have to pay him in real money.