The Crypto Industry Emerged As a ‘Political Money Death Star’ in 2024

Close your eyes and make a list of the most important issues in the 2024 election. Maybe you thought of the cost of living, abortion, immigration, democracy, climate change, gun violence, the war in Gaza, the Supreme Court. If you’re like the vast majority of voters, the word you probably didn’t think of is “cryptocurrency.” 

But in the last year, the crypto industry quietly became the biggest corporate spender of the entire 2024 election. According to a report from the nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen, nearly half of the $274 million in corporate money contributed during this year’s elections came from crypto firms. For comparison, the second biggest spender, Koch Industries — the corporation made famous by Jane Mayer’s opus Dark Money — gave $40 million to its Super PAC, Americans for Prosperity Action. Koch’s firm and employee PAC only put around $6 million toward electing Republicans to Congress.

After its 2024 spending spree, crypto industry cash is poised to account for a staggering 15 percent of all known corporate contributions made since the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United, the watchdog group found.

The sheer scale of the spending “is unprecedented and unlike anything that we have seen before,” says Rick Claypool, who authored the report for Public Citizen. He likens it to a “political money Death Star that they’re just sort of aiming at the candidates and races.” The industry’s donations appear to be both about achieving its narrow policy agenda — a demand for light-touch regulation in Washington — as well as striking fear into candidates’ hearts about the possibility they’ll spend against them.

If crypto regulations didn’t crack your top 10 election issues, you’re not alone. For a lot of people in Washington, it hadn’t registered. At the Democratic National Convention in July, I spoke with a Treasury Department staffer who just shrugged when I asked whether they were concerned about the rising influence of the crypto industry in Washington. Who represents them? The staffer asked. Can you think of a single Senator or Congressperson who is working to advance their interests? I couldn’t.

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Cryptocurrencies, or digital currencies, have, until now, been an afterthought — or worse — in Washington. Just ask Bernie Moreno, the newly-minted senator from Ohio. “Ten years ago, it was the laughingstock of the tech world,” Moreno said of the crypto industry in October. “Here you are 10 years later, and they’re going to be decisive in helping Republicans win the United States Senate.” 

And they were: This cycle, the crypto industry’s Super PACs poured $133 million into federal races around the country. The industry spent more than $40 million on the Ohio Senate race, where it helped unseat the crypto-skeptical chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

There’s a reason that crypto hasn’t ranked at the top of mind for most politicians or voters until now: It has no real use-case or intrinsic value. On the other hand, according to the Pew Research Center, roughly 17 percent of U.S. adults say they have owned cryptocurrency — a figure that’s remained relatively static for the past three years. 

In recent years, several crypto companies have blown up amid claims of fraud or that they operated as Ponzi schemes. During the Biden administration, the industry has faced unprecedented scrutiny, as regulators took aim at some of the most prominent firms in the crypto business — including Coinbase and Ripple — for allegedly selling unregistered securities. Some players in the industry have printed oodles of cash and began deploying it in an effort to will themselves into the position of power players.

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By the time I had that conversation this summer, the industry, led by Coinbase and Ripple, was already mounting an aggressive campaign to ensure that politicians would begin taking cryptocurrency very seriously. That campaign started in earnest this February, when Fairshake, the primary crypto industry-funded Super PAC began pouring money into the California Senate primary, in a single-minded effort to ensure Orange County’s progressive congresswoman, Katie Porter, went down in defeat. There were two oddities about this investment. For one thing, while Porter was not an industry ally, she was not a particularly outspoken crypto critic; for another, she was already expected to lose. 

Fairshake ended up spending more than $10 million — roughly one-third of the total Porter raised for her Senate bid — on ads attacking Porter’s character. As a person familiar with the PAC’s strategy explained to the New Yorker earlier this year, the group had an explicit goal in mind, and it wasn’t just to ensure that Porter lost. It was “to terrify other politicians—‘to warn anyone running for office that, if you are anti-crypto, the industry will come after you.’” 

Fairshake appeared to replicate this strategy when it waded into other races in which progressive incumbents without significant political positions on crypto were already cruising toward losses: Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both of whom were targeted by another interest group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC, over their criticism of Israel. (Fairshake did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, the crypto PACs did not target their most outspoken critic in Congress, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was up for reelection this year. 

“She is perhaps the strongest opponent of crypto on the Hill, her Republican challenger was basically running on a cryptocurrency platform and, despite that, he received no backing from the major cryptocurrency PAC… And he lost his race by a huge margin,” says Molly White, who writes about the crypto industry in her newsletter Citation Needed. “Partly what was going on here is that they were trying to back winners so they could then come and say, ‘Look, we swept [the races we played in].’”

Now that the dust has settled on the 2024 elections, a picture is starting to emerge of just how successful the industry’s efforts were: All three of the candidates Fairshake spent against, per an accounting by OpenSecrets — Porter, Bowman and Bush — went down in defeat, while only 4 of 26 candidates they backed lost their races. (Two of those races remain uncalled, and two other candidates the PAC backed were not running for reelection this year.) 

So after spending all that money, what does the industry actually want? “If you look at the top spenders to these super PACs, basically every single one of them has some kind of enforcement action — if not multiple enforcement actions — open against them,” White says. 

For years now, the standard line has been that the industry wants clear regulation — in reality, companies want more favorable regulation and regulators.

White explains, “When you actually look at how they have reacted to both the enforcement of existing regulations and proposed regulations, and it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny that they actually want regulations, because they have strongly opposed the enforcement of very standard financial regulations on their products thus far. Pretty much any time some sort of legislation or proposal comes up that would seek to regulate the industry or offer more consumer protections, they are vehemently against it.”

Generally speaking, at the moment, any Bitcoin related companies are governed by the commodities regulator, while the Securities and Exchange Commission has generally maintained that other cryptocurrencies ought to be regulated by the SEC itself — a position that cryptocurrency companies generally oppose and are actively challenging in several cases that currently being litigated, White says. 

During his 2024 bid, President-elect Donald Trump actively courted crypto firms, pitching himself as “the crypto president.” He pledged to make America “the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world,” demanding crypto only be mined in the U.S. — despite its massive energy use and negative local impacts. 

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Trump pledged to promptly fire SEC chair Gary Gensler and replace him with a regulator who is friendly to the industry. 

Now that Trump won and Republicans have secured a governing trifecta in Washington, the crypto industry appears to have won the friendly regulatory environment it spent so much money to cultivate. And it’s not resting on its laurels: Fairshake already has $78 million on hand for the next cycle.