Ian Calderon Runs for California Governor, Vows to Make State ‘Undisputed Leader’ on Bitcoin

Ian Calderon, a Democrat and former California Assembly majority leader, announced his candidacy for governor with a promise to put Bitcoin at the heart of state policy.

“California has always been a leader on technology. It’s time for us to get back to our roots and make California the undisputed leader on Bitcoin,” Calderon tweeted Tuesday.

Calderon has been a staunch advocate of the digital asset, confirming in a livestream earlier on the same day that, once elected, he would “make sure that we hold Bitcoin on our balance sheet” and support crypto payments for state programs.

In a separate campaign video, Calderon compared his positioning with the status quo.

“My generation pays bills on our phones, we send money to each other with Venmo and we save in Bitcoin,” Calderon said. “But the people running our government, they’re trying to use yesterday’s ideas to solve today’s problems, and it isn’t working.”

“Ambitious and daring”

Calderon’s statements are not without weight or work behind it.

Having left the Assembly in 2020 after three terms, he remained active in the policy space, including work with the Satoshi Action Fund in 2022 that explored legislation to consider Bitcoin as legal tender in the state. Calderon is also cited as a contributor in a 2020 roadmap developed by California’s Blockchain Working Group, a forum that produced policy recommendations on digital assets.

Much earlier in 2018, Calderon authored AB 2658, which created California’s Blockchain Working Group to evaluate the technology’s uses, risks, benefits, and legal implications for state government and businesses, define blockchain in statute, and develop policy recommendations including possible amendments to state law.

Calderon’s stance “shows that crypto has entered the mainstream, because candidates are now openly running on pro-crypto platforms and competing with one another,” Robert Boris Mofrad, co-founder of blockchain data storage firm Serenity, told Decrypt.

Yet whether the position is adopted or received “by the masses” would remain unclear, Mofrad noted. “But what we can understand is that crypto is now a serious part of the political conversation, one that began at the federal level with the idea of creating a reserve.”

“California putting Bitcoin on its balance sheet is quite an ambitious and daring position,” Mofrad said. “When it comes to a state such as California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, the situation is different.”

Because governments “usually treat Bitcoin as an intangible asset,” and must “record every loss in value but cannot really record gains,” such proposals make it “hard for a state treasury to manage responsibly,” he added.

California and crypto

Calderon’s campaign comes as California weighs incremental crypto legislation through two key legal frameworks.

AB 1180 would allow certain state agencies to pilot stablecoin payments for fees beginning in 2026, while AB 1052 brings crypto under the state’s unclaimed property law by requiring inactive custodial accounts to be transferred to the state and held in their original form.

Neither measure, however, would authorize California to purchase or hold Bitcoin directly, marking a clear distinction from Calderon’s proposal.