Short thoughts, notes, links, and musings by Molly White. RSS 
A bit rich for Senator Bernie Moreno — by far the #1 beneficiary of crypto super PAC spending in 2024, now a champion of the industry's legislation — to accuse anyone of caping for special interest super PACs
The White House says Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick properly divested from Cantor Fitzgerald by transferring leadership to his sons.
Anyway GOP officials called Lutnick about a Cantor-funded PAC planning to spend $1.75M on Ken Paxton and the PAC reversed course, but that’s probably just how independent companies behave when the former owner gets a phone call.
The new Fellowship crypto PAC has filed its first fundraising disclosure. It reports a $10 million contribution from Cantor Fitzgerald (previously headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, now controlled by his sons) and $1 million from Anchorage Digital.
The Fellowship PAC launched in September with an announcement that they had $100 million committed. They've recently revealed that the PAC is headed by Tether's head of government affairs Jesse Spiro, and endorsed a slate of Republicans.
Fellowship PAC has made three independent expenditures so far, totalling $1.5M:
In September 2025, a new cryptocurrency super PAC launched, claiming to have $100 million committed.
If true, it would mean the crypto super PACs would have nearly half again as much cash to deploy in the midterms. But their EOY filing showed $0, and I was beginning to wonder if it was a bust.
A week ago, Fellowship PAC announced that Jesse Spiro, head of government affairs at stablecoin company Tether, would be chairing the PAC. Now they've endorsed a slate of Republican candidates, and made their first expenditure ($300,000 in the last moments of Clayton Fuller's successful bid for the special election in GA-14).
It seems like this PAC will indeed be entering the playing field, and potentially dramatically increasing the amount of money in play on behalf of the crypto industry if their earlier claims around funds committed are to be believed. There are a few more days until their quarterly filing is due, at which point we should get more insight into how much money this PAC has on hand and where it's coming from.
Their endorsements so far:
The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries (Stratton in the Senate race, Ford in H-07) or supporting their opponents.
The PACs' only victories in the state were where they contributed money towards outcomes that were already highly likely. They opposed Robert Peters (H-02), who had been polling in third place and ultimately received 12% of the vote. They supported Bean (who was leading the polls in H-08) and incumbent Budzinski (H-13).
Sadly this early spending in Illinois used up less than 6% of what the super PACs have on hand, so buckle up for a looong eight months.
The Coinbase-backed "Stand With Crypto" advocacy group has declared Illinois Senate candidate Juliana Stratton to be "strongly against crypto" solely because she made a statement criticizing the $5.5 million the crypto industry had already spent to oppose her
There are a number of senators who’ve taken a look at this but there seems to be no will to move forward because No. 1, people don’t understand A.I., but because, No. 2, we’ve seen the entry of really big political money tied to A.I. Just like the crypto space, a lot of senators are scared to stick their neck out even though action is being demanded of us on this issue.
Fascinating comment on AI regulation from Elissa Slotkin of all people, who received $10 million — the second-most support — from crypto PACs in 2024.
Great background on why Coinbase sank the crypto bill they’d just spent months lobbying for, and the fundamental conflict between the banking lobby and the crypto lobby when it comes to stablecoin interest.
how magnanimous of him
“We’ve got a chance to do a new draft and hopefully get back into a markup in a few weeks,” [Coinbase CEO Brian] Armstrong said.
he saw Mamdani talking about housing and thought: but what about crypto?
my guess is this is more of a hail mary attempt to get blockchain/AI money and influence behind him. we haven't seen much crypto industry spending in races below the federal level, but i also wouldn't put it past them to get involved here at the last minute