Highlights:
- Crypto groups spend heavily to find industry backers from both parties
- Super PAC Fairshake directs strategy after 2024 successes
- Lawmakers critical of crypto say they've been targeted with personal attacks
- Crypto industry has benefited from Trump's personal interests
The crypto industry has spent roughly $176 million across more than 100 midterm races this election cycle, as part of a years-long plan to build a bipartisan coalition of allies in Congress that can advance its interests long after US President Donald Trump leaves office.
The $2.75 trillion industry, and the billionaires who built it, are aggressively spending to elect friendly candidates while targeting politicians they see as a threat, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen crypto political strategists and a Reuters review of the spending.
While the industry's recent spending blitz is known, its long-term plan to further its legislative agenda is less well-understood. The industry isn't just looking for allies; it is trying to pick candidates who already have a chance of winning, and can help once they get to Congress, the strategists said.
Crypto's largest super political action committee, Fairshake, which spent $196 million during the 2024 election cycle, is leading the industry's strategy again. Fairshake said 53 of the 58 candidates it supported in primaries or special elections this year won and will be on the ballot on November 3.
Super PACs can accept and spend unlimited sums of money, but cannot coordinate directly with campaigns. They are flooding several races with tens of millions of dollars in ads.
Voters have little way of knowing who pays for these ads, which barely mention crypto. Most of Fairshake's are sponsored by its affiliate PACs with innocuous names like "Defend American Jobs" and "Protect Progress." The ads often focus on hot-button issues like taxes or immigration.
Perceived enemies, such as longtime skeptic Sherrod Brown, vying to return to the Senate in Ohio, can be subjected to an onslaught of often-personal attacks. Advocacy group Public Citizen said crypto was the single-biggest corporate spender in federal races in 2026, after saying in 2024 that its spending was "akin to a corporate Death Star hovering over elections."
The PACs' primary financiers, led by Coinbase, Ripple and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, aren't trying to convince voters to support digital currencies. The money is a calling card to help forge long-term relationships with elected officials, said industry strategists, campaign staff, watchdog groups and political finance managers.
It underscores how the industry is behaving as other businesses do in Washington — using funds to open doors and buffer itself against regulation. The strategy reflects the reality that come 2029, the occupant of the White House is unlikely to be as personally invested in crypto as Trump, whose family made around $2.3 billion from crypto ventures between mid-2024 and April, a Reuters investigation found.
"It's an investment in the future," said Colin McLaren, head of government relations at crypto industry advocacy group the Solana Policy Institute, which has given $4.9 million to the midterms this year, according to campaign finance records.
The effort is designed to "ensure that over the next 100 years, the crypto industry has clear rules of the road, and that we know what our regulators are expecting from us," he said.
Through October 20, Fairshake and its affiliate PACs have spent about $150.8 million on the midterms this year, while other crypto groups have spent around $25 million, according to campaign finance filings.
"We back pro-crypto candidates who support American innovation in both parties, and look forward to continuing to build on the largest pro-crypto caucus in American history," said Geoff Vetter, spokesperson for Fairshake.
Come a long way
In 2018, lawmakers couldn't even get a room in the House or Senate office buildings to hold the first congressional bipartisan roundtable discussion on crypto, instead meeting across the street from the US Capitol in the Library of Congress, said Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute, who helped establish the Blockchain Association that year.
The Biden administration heavily scrutinized the industry following the collapse of FTX and an industry-wide meltdown in 2022, with the US Securities and Exchange Commission eventually levying more than $6 billion in penalties in 98 cases, according to a Georgetown University Law study.
"It was an all-out assault on the technology," said Smith, the Blockchain Association's interim CEO. "The industry was in a corner, and the only way out was to show political force."
Executives decided they needed a political strategy to combat what they called then-SEC chair Gary Gensler's "regulation by enforcement," lobbyists, advocacy groups and campaign strategists said.
Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad was the architect behind nonprofit political advocacy group Stand With Crypto — which isn't required to disclose its donors — and Fairshake, which both launched in 2023. The number of Congresspeople with an "A" rating from Stand With Crypto is up to 332, compared with 96 when the group launched.
As the industry has won more legal clarity in Washington, its market value has nearly tripled from around $1 trillion in 2023 to about $2.75 trillion now, according to CoinGecko.
The combination of Trump, a growing bipartisan congressional coalition and a neutered opposition allowed the industry to advance its legislative agenda more in the last two years than some industries have done in decades, other industry lobbyists say.
That includes 2025's Genius Act legislation establishing the first-ever US federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support. That followed a White House meeting earlier in the year when industry leaders, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, sat with Trump when the president declared an end to the "war on crypto."
"Moving that quickly in Washington is like light speed in space," said Ron Bonjean, partner at bipartisan public affairs firm Rokk Solutions, and a former senior Senate aide.
The industry's real goal is passing the Clarity Act, which would put crypto oversight under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That bill stalled in this congressional session and faces an uphill battle next year if Democrats win control of one or more chambers of Congress.
Without it, agency-level regulations undertaken during Trump's term can be reversed by a subsequent administration, analysts at JPMorgan said.
Fairshake is financing House candidates from both parties, but it decided to only back Republicans in Senate races after Democrats in that chamber blocked the Clarity Act from advancing to a final vote. Their opposition centered around an ethics provision that would have forced the Trump family to sell their crypto holdings.
Gary Kalman, of anti-corruption nonprofit Transparency International, criticized the bill for shifting regulation to the less-stringent CFTC, and for preempting states from enacting tougher laws.
Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment. Ripple didn't return requests for comment.
The prime target
Fairshake's highest-profile win in 2024 was defeating Brown, an industry foe who chaired the Senate Banking Committee from 2021 to 2024.
Spending millions attacking the sitting chairman of the industry's oversight committee was unprecedented in Washington, corporate watchdogs and political strategists say. But the gamble paid off.
Now, Brown is running again, with public opinion polls showing him with a narrow lead over his opponent, Republican Jon Husted. The industry has spent more than $68 million on the race, helping to make it one of the most expensive on record, according to AdImpact.
Fairshake's ads opposing Brown, which it did not comment on, don't mention crypto. One charges him with voting to raise gas taxes in Ohio and raises a Reuters-debunked claim that he voted to "unleash 87,000 IRS agents on you while voting to give social security benefits to illegals."
"Of course, the special interests are panicking, they know Sherrod will fight the rigged system they're feasting on to stand up for working Ohioans," said Patrick Eisenhauer, Brown's campaign manager.
A crypto money bomb
In some races, crypto spending dwarfed candidate fundraising. The industry spent $5.3 million in a Maryland House Democratic primary to support state Delegate Adrian Boafo, who raised $1.9 million on his own, records show. Other non-crypto groups spent $6.8 million to support Boafo's campaign, which declined to comment.
"There were so many ads ... that it makes other candidates suffocate," said Quincy Bareebe, a healthcare entrepreneur who came in second of 24 candidates in that primary despite spending $6.6 million of her own money. "Adrian was everywhere."
The industry was less successful in Illinois. Fairshake spent over $10.1 millionon ads attacking Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, who is running for US Senate, and another $2.5 million against Illinois state Representative La Shawn Ford, who is running for a Chicago-area congressional district. Both are expected to win on November 3.
Ford defeated a dozen primary challengers despite raising just $500,000 and lending his campaign $175,000 to fight off industry-funded ads that brought up a 14-year-old federal indictment that was later dropped. His campaign issued a cease-and-desist letter to Fairshake, accusing it of making defamatory statements about him in its ads.
Fairshake did not comment on its ads or Ford's response. Ford thinks Fairshake targeted him because he supported state legislation to require crypto exchanges and related companies to register with Illinois.
"They were relentless, on every outlet, radio, TV, social media, mailers," Ford said. "It was personal and it was hurtful, and unnecessary for my family to have to go through."