Fairshake: Crypto Titans Use Old-School Dollars to Turn Tide in Congress

Here's the new political calculus for a U.S. congressional candidate: You nod to crypto and say you're on the pro-innovation side, and chances are, a million dollars (or more) could drop from the sky to pay for TV spots that highlight your strengths or pillory your opponent.

In any of hundreds of lesser known districts of the House of Representatives, a few hundred thousand dollars tends to make or break a candidate. When the leading crypto-driven political action committee notices you, a massive influx of cash can pave your way straight to Congress. The Fairshake super PAC isn't subtle. It's nuclear. For a relatively small industry, Fairshake is the biggest corporate money player in U.S. politics. And it's not close to hanging up its hat as the Nov. 5 elections recede into the past.

The main PAC and its two affiliate cousins spent some $139 million on the 2024 elections. Just Congress, mind you, not the presidential showdown. What the crypto sector wants is legislation, and Fairshake is all about securing the most expedient path toward the right number of supporters on Capitol Hill.

It's got about $30 million left from this cycle. And its top industry benefactors have committed to another $73 million. Before the 2026 cycle even begins, this super PAC is already dominating the field with $103 million.

Thanks to current U.S. election rules, corporate interests can spend unlimited amounts to support or oppose campaigns, as long as they do so through "independent expenditures" that purchase advertising without coordinating with the campaigns they're helping. Fairshake aimed to take full advantage of that with a simple goal. According to its primary spokesman, Josh Vlasto, the goal was to "support candidates who supported this industry and wanted to work across the aisle to advance responsible regulation," he told CoinDesk in an interview.

They set out to show Washington that crypto was now "really focused on building a professional political operation that was going to be very well resourced and effective."

Into 2026

So what can we still expect from what may be the most influential, issue-driven political force in the U.S.? A close look at 2024 probably tells you all you need to know about what's still to come.

Coinbase, Ripple Labs and crypto investment firm a16z raised Fairshake from the ashes of the industry's most recent campaign machinery, tapping at least two people involved in running a previous version. But, in contrast to the customary radical-transparency vibe the industry is proud of, Fairshake's origin story is a no-go for the involved companies. They won't talk about how Fairshake was formed and who hired whom. They won't discuss the ongoing relationship between the heavy donors and the PAC management.

"We have consultants and advisors on both sides of the aisle," said Vlasto, the person who most often does the talking for Fairshake. "We also take input from our supporters, you know, which represent real industry leaders from the crypto and blockchain sector."While the activity of the organization is publicly disclosed, as the rules require, and the broad strategy of Fairshake is clear, the nuts and bolts are off-limits.

"I'm not getting into the sort of day-to-day," Vlasto said. "All I can speak to is sort of the outcome of it. And the outcome is a very successful election cycle."The industry had a profoundly tarnished reputation to build on, because disgraced FTX frontman Sam Bankman-Fried was the leading driver of crypto's campaign contributions in the last congressional election. <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/01/17/congress-ftx-problem-1-in-3-members-got-cash-from-crypto-exchanges-bosses" target="_blank">One in three members of Congress</a> were funded by he and other FTX executives under his watch, though the dollar amounts paled in comparison to what the industry spent this time. Still, all those members were forced to figure out how to deal with the tainted contributions after the company imploded in a cloud of fraud.

That's nothing Vlasto can speak to, he insists, because Fairshake is an entirely new effort with "really the crème de la crème and the blue chip companies across crypto and blockchain."

And, while they were erecting their political siege engine, Coinbase also propped up an advocacy organization called Stand With Crypto meant to rally the troops. It was billed as "<a href="https://www.coinbase.com/blog/introducing-the-stand-with-crypto-alliance" target="_blank">crypto’s first true grassroots movement</a>," despite its origin as a corporate-funded project in which Coinbase initially handled its public relations and staffed its events.

It features Fairshake's company-led effort on its website, but it also raises money for its own activities, such as running events and maintaining a database evaluating politicians' crypto support. The organization says it's so far taken in $2.8 million, though its supporter list indicates $2.3 million of that is from companies <a href="https://www.standwithcrypto.org/press/stand-with-crypto-announces-2024-advocacy-campaign" target="_blank">Exodus</a> and <a href="https://www.moonpay.com/newsroom/stand-with-crypto" target="_blank">Moonpay</a>.

Stand With Crypto signed up almost 2 million online supporters. That large number of digital assets enthusiasts is often touted as evidence of a groundswell in public support.

From political pariah to belle-of-the-ball in less than two years, the crypto industry learned in 2024 that aggressive tactics and a whole lot of money were the answer to overcoming reputational damage.

Influencing the agenda

This current congressional session provided Fairshake a live-fire exercise in influence. Instead of a theoretical idea of what crypto legislation future members of Congress may be willing to support, Fairshake got to make a more urgent case with its outsized war chest.

Two highly significant crypto test cases made a splash in Congress earlier this year.

First — and most notably — the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) was Representative Patrick McHenry's effort to move a wide-reaching set of standards to regulate the U.S. crypto markets from top to bottom.

The other was a campaign to permanently erase a Securities and Exchange Commission crypto accounting policy in which the agency sought to make public companies hold their customers' digital assets on their own balance sheets. It effectively forced banks to maintain capital against those assets — a cost-prohibitive demand that contributed to U.S. bankers shying away from crypto.

Both matters came up for votes. FIT21 was shepherded personally by McHenry, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who hoped the bill could be his swan song as he leaves the Hill at the end of the year. The Republican legislation became the first significant crypto measure to clear the committee and win passage by the House, pulling in a massive 71-vote block of Democrats and demonstrating that there's a wide bipartisan cooperation available on digital assets legislation.

And it provided the simplest litmus test possible for the industry to know which House lawmakers were worthy of crypto cash. At the time the bill was on the House floor, the existence of Fairshake's campaign muscle had already been noisily demonstrated when it spent about $10 million to throttle the Senate hopes of Representative Katie Porter, a <a href="https://x.com/katieporteroc/status/1757445157488837069" target="_blank">crypto skeptic</a> in California. The lawmakers who voted on FIT21 were well aware that the new player in campaign finance was watching and stood very willing to spend millions to bolster friends and defeat enemies.

Even before it spent millions to ensure more allies in the 2025 session of Congress, Fairshake was already influencing policy. 

The SEC's controversial accounting rule — known as Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121, or SAB 121 — came up for a vote in the Senate as lobbyists sought to reverse the SEC's position. That vote was made possible after the Government Accountability Office said the regulator mishandled the policy by trying to tuck it into staff guidance rather than treating it as a full-blown rule. Lawmakers sought to toss it out under the Congressional Review Act, and both the House and Senate passed the effort. Most notably, the 60-38 Senate vote showed a significant number of Democrats bucking their leadership to join. It forced President Joe Biden to make good on a veto threat, meaning the policy remained intact at the SEC despite Congress' wishes.

Still, it gave Fairshake and the crypto industry a list of which sitting senators were on the side of this financial technology.

"The broad strategy was to pick races where ultimately someone who was pro-crypto, pro-blockchain, pro-innovation would come out on top and win the scene," Vlasto said.

During the primaries, the PAC often deployed money in big bursts, sometimes dumping more than $1 million into a relatively obscure campaign where that kind of money could drown out opposition. On social media, high-profile Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized the spending as "<a href="https://bsky.app/profile/aoc.bsky.social/post/3lbnvgzs7yc22" target="_blank">insane sums</a>." At first, much of it was based on relatively flimsy evidence of crypto support on candidate websites, but with incumbent lawmakers, their recent voting record made for harder targets.

In the Democrat-dominated congressional district that covers Westchester County and part of the Bronx in New York, incumbent Representative Jamaal Bowman has opposed both of the big crypto efforts. Fairshake dropped <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&si=hpAbtwqMRio10vXX&v=AIXvp_zJD6I&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">more than $2 million in negative ads</a> against him in that race, and Bowman was easily defeated in the primary.

When it came to lining up the congressional races it would support, the group was also very careful to balance its choices between the two major parties, often angering both. In the end, it backed about the same from each, though its two marquee efforts devoted tens of millions to derailing Democrats the industry disliked: Porter in California and Senator Sherrod Brown (Ohio), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Where its practical thinking was obvious, though, could be seen in Massachusetts, where Fairshake didn't devote money to crypto lawyer John Deaton's race against Senator Elizabeth Warren, the well-known Democrat who is arguably the industry's most powerful critic on Capitol Hill. The odds were always very long against beating Warren in her state, and money spent there was ultimately wasted.

A point of pride for Fairshake staff is that any time a candidate started objecting that corporate money from crypto was underwriting their opponent, the argument was unsuccessful. The PAC organizers interpret that record as demonstrating that voters aren't moved by efforts to use digital assets as a political scare tactic. 

"When we supported a candidate aggressively who was pro-crypto, their opponent attempted to make an issue out of the spending and say that voters should not support our preferred candidate because they were receiving support from crypto," Vlasto recalled, and that opponent tended to lose. "Every time." Going into 2025 and a new congressional session, more than four dozen members of Congress were backed by Fairshake — almost half of them new arrivals in their elected office. At this point, the PAC estimates that about 300 of the 535 members of the House and Senate are on crypto's side. 

But Fairshake has $103 million in its pockets before most other super PACs have even started, meaning sitting lawmakers in the next session will be aware that a huge stockpile of cash will be ready to help them in 2026 if they cooperate with crypto legislation.

And those hoping to join Congress in the 2027 session will know that a simple nod toward crypto could help them raise fast support.

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.

Fairshake's approach will not only influence the U.S. legislative branch. The crypto industry has now demonstrated that large amounts of money concentrated into a single purpose can have an outsized electoral impact.

"We were on the right side of the arguments," Faryar Shirzad, chief policy officer of Coinbase in a CoinDesk interview, when asked whether another group could repeat the results.

Beyond the campaign money, there was a wider upswell of crypto support. "I don't know if other industries can replicate the grassroots and the merits of the arguments in the way we can. But I doubt it."