This is the second in a series of stories examining the crypto industry’s high-stakes 2024 foray into politics and campaigning. The first explored the electoral track record of Fairshake PAC’s strategy.

While politicians battled each other across the 2024 U.S. electoral map, the crypto industry ran an unprecedented test of a 14-year-old Supreme Court decision that had dynamited a new tunnel into politics for corporate cash.

Thanks to a 2010 high-court case, a company can spend as much as it likes to bolster political allies and destroy enemies. It’s constitutionally protected speech, and crypto businesses spoke loudly this year.

Seeing business interests influencing U.S. politics is nothing new, but there was something different about crypto’s Fairshake political action committee and the $169 million it ultimately gathered. The organization chose not to bother with the niceties sometimes seen from mega-industries coating their policy agendas in pro-American, economy-boosting rhetoric. The Fairshake super PAC and its affiliated PACs didn’t sugar-coat their aim: Getting as many crypto allies as possible on Capitol Hill, so they can write a crypto-friendly U.S. rulebook.

Three big crypto business names — Coinbase Inc. (COIN), Ripple Labs and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) — came together and moved enormous sums into the coffers of the campaign-finance operation. The PACs began to heap million after million into congressional districts across the country in 2024, overwhelming many contests during the primaries. The flow of money was transparent, even if the people and strategies deploying it were not.

And it was all possible because of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision commonly known as Citizens United, which along with a related cluster of cases has allowed corporations to purchase an unlimited amount of independent advertising for political campaigns. The PACs plowed $10 million into an effort to derail Representative Katie Porter’s bid to be a senator in California, nudging the Democrat out during the primary there and avoiding the ascension of a politician they feared would join Senator Elizabeth Warren’s crusade against crypto interests. The grou

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Author: Jesse Hamilton