Thoughts tagged "Follow the Crypto"

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In September 2025, a new cryptocurrency super PAC launched, claiming to have $100 million committed.

Press release from Fellowship PAC: THE FELLOWSHIP PAC The Fellowship PAC Launches With Over $100 Million Committed to Protect America's Leadership in Innovation and Transparency Washington, DC September 15th., 2025: The Fellowship PAC, a new independent-expenditure, today announced over $100 million commitment to back pro-innovation, pro-crypto candidates who will safeguard America's role as the global leader in digital assets and entrepreneurship. The Fellowship PAC represents the next step in the industry's evolution-building on the unprecedented momentum that innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors have already created. Unlike past political efforts, the Fellowship PAC's mission is defined by transparency and trust, ensuring political action directly supports the broader ecosystem rather than narrow or individual interests. Under President Trump's administration, a regulatory framework is being established that puts America on the path to become the global crypto capital. The Fellowship PAC will exist to carry that momentum forward, reinforcing America's competitive edge in digital asset innovation and guaranteeing that founders and domestic crypto companies have the freedom, clarity, and regulatory support to build the future here at home. The PAC will focus on: Supporting candidates committed to transparent and predictable rules for digital assets. Protecting America's global competitive advantage in technology and entrepreneurship. Ensuring that the innovation economy reflects American values of openness, fairness, and opportunity. Preventing the continued exodus of talent and entrepreneurs offshore by keeping the U.S. the best place to innovate, and providing firm regulatory clarity. Transparency and trust is our differentiator. This PAC is designed to align the interests of crypto entrepreneurs, policymakers, and the public, ensuring trust and accountability as we continue building the ecosystem. This is not the end-it's only the beginning. More to come. About the Fellowship PAC: The Fellowship PAC is registered as an independent-expenditure-only committee (super PAC). It does not coordinate with candidates or parties. Its mission is to ensure the United States remains the global leader in crypto and innovation through transparent, ecosystem-wide support.

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:

  •  Alan Wilson, South Carolina governor
  • Mike Collins, Georgia Senate
  • Julia Letlow, Louisiana Senate
  • Pete Ricketts, Nebraska Senate (incumbent)
  • Nate Morris, Kentucky Senate
  • Blake Miguez, Louisiana House District 5

part of keeping FollowTheCrypto.org up-to-date includes scraping candidate photos — including some pretty far down ballot — and if there's one takeaway it's that some people really don't have a built in "whoa, too much" threshold when it comes to filtering photos

At this stage of the election cycle, cryptocurrency-focused PACs have contributed more overall to Democrats than to Republicans.

A bar chart showing $22 million in spending in favor of Democrats and $16.1 million in favor of Republicans

Most of this actually comes from opposition spending to Democrats. While many have assumed that crypto PACs’ opposition to Democrats was in support of Republicans, that’s not actually the case thus far. However, it's worth noting that in races where PACs have opposed candidates but have not supported any candidates (CA Senate primary, NY-16 Democratic primary), they are clearly more focused on ousting candidates they view as anti-crypto rather than on supporting any specific candidate.

I’ve laid this all out in a new page: https://www.followthecrypto.org/spending.

Crossposting a comment I made on HackerNews about Follow the Crypto, since I'm seeing a lot of this kind of whataboutism:

The real story here is how much power individuals have over our political landscape. George Soros, for example, has injected more than $125M into the midterm race in 2022[1]. To be clear, this is not a partisan issue; the Kochs raised over $70M last year[2].

I fully agree with you that the broader problem is Citizens United and the ability for corporations and the super wealthy to pour this much money into politics. In fact, I mention this here: FAQ.

I think projects like mine would be extremely valuable for all industries, and I'm enormously grateful to groups like OpenSecrets that do excellent work making a far broader swath of the data more legible. But I am one person without the research team, time, or funding that would be necessary to analyze the data this deeply across industries, and so I focus on crypto (the subject of much of my research and writing).

The code is all open source, and I would be delighted if other projects like this one sprung up. It seems it would be a bit more productive to actually shine a light all the kinds of spending that happen throughout industries and across individuals, rather than using that other spending as a sort of whataboutist argument to dismiss projects like this one that (necessarily) focus on a subset of spending.

If you want to be critical of super PACs, crypto spending is literally a drop in the bucket and completely missing the forest for the trees. There is a story here, but crypto ain't it.

As this project highlights, crypto is far from a "drop in the bucket" when it comes to super PAC fundraising this cycle. The industry has dramatically ramped up its spending compared to previous election years, which is a large part of why I felt it was important to keep an eye on the spending.

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/