Photo: Satheesh Sankaran, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The cryptocurrency industry has poured roughly $176 million into more than 100 midterm races this election cycle, Reuters reported on Tuesday, in a deliberate effort to build a friendly Congress that will outlast President Donald Trump's time in office.
The spending is not only about the November 3 midterms. Industry strategists told Reuters the goal is a bipartisan bloc of lawmakers who will protect crypto's gains and pass the rules it wants for years to come — even after a president who has been unusually sympathetic to digital assets leaves the White House. The industry is now valued at about $2.75 trillion, Reuters said, nearly triple its roughly $1 trillion value in 2023.
Fairshake leads a $150 million-plus push
The largest vehicle is Fairshake, the industry's main super PAC, which spent $196 million in the 2024 cycle. Fairshake said 53 of the 58 candidates it backed in primaries or special elections this year won and will appear on the November 3 ballot.
Through October 20, Fairshake and its affiliated PACs had spent about $150.8 million on the midterms, with other crypto groups adding roughly $25 million, according to campaign finance filings cited by Reuters. Its biggest backers are Coinbase, Ripple and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Super PACs may raise and spend unlimited sums but may not coordinate directly with campaigns, and much of Fairshake's advertising runs under affiliate names such as "Defend American Jobs" and "Protect Progress" — ads that often focus on taxes or immigration and barely mention crypto at all.
Advocacy group Public Citizen described crypto as the single biggest corporate spender in federal races in 2026. A separate Reuters analysis found that a clutch of ultra-wealthy crypto executives alone has spent more than $56 million this cycle, including nearly $13 million each from Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, mostly to MAGA Inc, the main super PAC supporting Trump.
What the money is meant to buy
The industry's immediate prize is the Clarity Act, which would place most crypto oversight with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The bill has stalled in this Congress and would face a harder path next year if Democrats win control of one or both chambers. Without it, industry figures warn, agency-level rules adopted under Trump could be reversed by a later administration.
Crypto already secured one major win: the 2025 Genius Act, the first federal framework for stablecoins, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support after Trump declared an end to what the industry called the "war on crypto." Fairshake is now backing candidates from both parties for the House, but only Republicans for the Senate, after Senate Democrats blocked the Clarity Act over an ethics provision that would have required the Trump family to sell its crypto holdings. Reuters has previously reported that the Trump family made around $2.3 billion from crypto ventures between mid-2024 and April.
Gary Kalman of Transparency International criticised the push to move oversight to the CFTC, which he described as less stringent than current regulators, and warned the bill would pre-empt tougher state rules. Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment to Reuters; Ripple did not respond.
Ohio, Maryland and Illinois show the playbook
The most expensive test case is Ohio, where former Senator Sherrod Brown, a longtime crypto sceptic who chaired the Senate Banking Committee from 2021 to 2024, is trying to return to the Senate. The industry has spent more than $68 million on that race, Reuters reported, making it one of the costliest on record, with polls showing Brown holding a narrow lead over Republican Jon Husted. Fairshake's ads against Brown do not mention crypto; one repeats a claim about IRS agents that Reuters has debunked.
In other races, crypto money has dwarfed the candidates themselves. The industry spent $5.3 million supporting Maryland state Delegate Adrian Boafo in a House Democratic primary, against $1.9 million he raised himself. In Illinois, Fairshake spent more than $10.1 million attacking Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton's Senate bid and $2.5 million against Representative La Shawn Ford's congressional campaign; both are still expected to win on November 3, Reuters reported. Ford, who said the ads dredged up a 14-year-old indictment that was later dropped, told Reuters the campaign against him felt personal: "They were relentless, on every outlet, radio, TV, social media, mailers."
For the industry, that mixed record is beside the point. As one advocate put it to Reuters, the spending is "an investment in the future" — designed, in his words, to make sure that over the next century the industry has clear rules and knows what its regulators expect.
Sources: Reuters (crypto midterm spending report and companion analysis of crypto executives' spending, October 27, 2026); Channel NewsAsia republication of the Reuters report. Spending figures are Reuters' analysis of campaign finance filings; Fairshake's win-rate claim is Fairshake's own statement, as reported by Reuters.