Activity tagged "crypto"

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Coinbase has tried to portray its “Stand With Crypto” PAC as having broad grassroots support among over a million “crypto advocates”, and boasts on its homepage of nearly $180 million raised by these advocates.

Its first quarterly FEC filing reveals it has had only $13,690 in contributions from seven people over the most recent three-month period. Two of them work for Stand With Crypto and two of them work for Coinbase.

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After my reporting about the falsified donations amount on the Stand With Crypto homepage, the PAC added a tooltip that acknowledges that $177.8 million of the “donations by crypto advocates” are actually the multi million dollar donations by a handful of big crypto companies and their executives.

However, they still claim that $1.48 million was raised by Stand With Crypto itself. Either they've raised 99% of their funds in the last 19 days, or they’re doing more funny business with the numbers they’re claiming.

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Follow the Crypto

It’s finally time to release my newest project: FollowTheCrypto.org.

This website provides a real-time lens into the cryptocurrency industry’s efforts to influence 2024 elections in the United States.

A screenshot of the front page of FollowTheCrypto.org, showing total amounts raised by crypto-currency focused PACs ($203 million) and amounts spent ($38 million). There are also graphs showing expenditures by political party, and expenditures by PAC. There is a list of the top elections influenced by crypto industry money, of the most highly-funded super PACs overall, and of recent expenditures by crypto-focused committees.

I have been working on this for the past two months, after growing increasingly concerned about the influence this industry is trying to exert. Did you know crypto companies have spent more this cycle than the oil or pharmaceutical industries, despite being a small fraction of the size?

A bar chart showing the amount of election spending by sector. Data: Crypto $203,000,000,All health $193,706,986,Communications $178,671,462,Lawyers & lobbyists $172,810,610,All energy $152,567,769,Labor $120,230,704,Transportation $98,461,871,Construction $85,162,003,Agribusiness $84,400,550,Defense $25,445,961

There is more to come, including a bot that will post real-time updates about contributions or expenditures, which you can follow in advance at @followthecrypto . You can also learn more in my announcement post over at Citation Needed.

Please share widely! And, if you don’t already, consider supporting my work. This kind of independent research is what I do full-time, entirely thanks to support from people like you. https://www.mollywhite.net/support/