Dem Overseeing ‘Digital Assets’ to Hold Luxury Retreat With Crypto Kingpin

Freshman Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego was recently named the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee’s new subcommittee on “digital assets,” which will oversee cryptocurrencies. Next month, Gallego will hold a ritzy donor retreat alongside one of the crypto industry’s biggest cheerleaders and investors, Marc Andreessen.

The prolific political blogger Matt Yglesias will be a featured speaker at the Gallego event alongside Andreessen, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, according to an invite obtained by Rolling Stone. 

The invite suggests donations of $5,000 to attend the retreat, which is set to take place over three days at the luxury oasis L’Auberge de Sedona. (The cheapest accommodation available for out-of-state visitors that weekend, according to the resort’s website, is $1,809 per night, with a two-night minimum.) Donations will benefit Gallego’s leadership PAC, called Juntos PAC.

Representatives for Gallego did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Rolling Stone, asking if the senator thought it was appropriate to hold a fundraising retreat with one of the major funders of a pro-crypto Super PAC while also serving as ranking member on the Senate subcommittee overseeing the industry. (Andreessen Horowitz and Yglesias did not immediately respond to inquiries.)

Andreessen actively advised Donald Trump as he assembled his new pro-crypto administration. (Speaking on Bari Weiss’ podcast in December, Andreessen said he’d been spending half his time at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. “I’ve been trying to help in as many ways as I can,” he said.)

A crypto industry Super PAC called Protect Progress spent $10 million boosting Gallego’s 2024 Senate campaign. Protect Progress and its parent organization, Fairshake, received $138 million last election cycle from Andreessen, co-founder Ben Horowitz, and their firm, which has invested in crypto for years and lobbies extensively on crypto issues.

“The crypto industry has very quickly become one of the major players in the campaign finance system, and crypto money has been deployed in very aggressive and strategic ways,” says Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director at the watchdog group Documented. “Throughout the 2024 cycle, we saw crypto money deployed to take out crypto critics and support crypto backers, and this might be an indication of how crypto not only attacks its enemies, but also also rewards its friends.”

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Gallego recently took over the Arizona Senate seat vacated by Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat-turned-independent. Gallego’s entrance into the Senate race was seen as a victory for progressives, who were infuriated by Sinema’s repeated efforts to obstruct President Joe Biden’s policy agenda. 

While Gallego effectively forced her out of the race and into retirement, he ended up campaigning as a moderate — and cozying up to the crypto industry. The freshman senator is now the ranking member on the Senate’s subcommittee on digital assets, which has jurisdiction over cryptocurrencies, crypto trading platforms, and the agencies that regulate them. 

Sinema, for her part, recently joined the global advisory council of Coinbase, a crypto exchange that invested heavily in the industry Super PACs that supported Gallego’s bid.