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.
