Last week, Public Citizen ’s Rick Claypool and I filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission based on my research into apparent campaign finance violations by the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange.
Read the full complaint and my updated article.
The two candidates in today’s primaries that received substantial backing from cryptocurrency PACs both won their primaries.
1. John Curtis defeated Trent Staggs in the Republican Utah Senate primary, with the help of $1.7 million in crypto industry funding.
2. George Latimer defeated Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary for NY H-16, with the help of $2 million in crypto industry funding.
Ads run by these PACs made no mention of crypto or technology. In the NY race, ads from Fairshake seemed to align very closely with AIPAC’s aggressive campaign against Bowman, echoing their messaging accusing him of antisemitism.
“Defend American Jobs” was the PAC splashing out in the Utah race. They’re the Republican-focused crypto super PAC; “Protect Progress” is the Democrat counterpart.
Though Fairshake (nominally nonpartisan, and by far the highest fundraiser of the crypto PACs) previously made identical donations to both, they’ve just made another $5 million donation to Defend American Jobs without a corresponding donation to Protect Progress.
Defend American Jobs has raised $14.7 million so far this cycle; Protect Progress has raised $10.3 million.
Here's a glimpse at the spending in each race.
Other outside spending for Curtis mostly came from a super PAC called Conservative Values for Utah, with Defend American Jobs pitching in $5M last minute.
And as I mentioned, Bowman’s other opposition primarily came from AIPAC's UDP.
The crypto industry jumps on the Trump train.
So what gives? Why the hell would the famously liberal denizens of Silicon Valley and the idealistic dreamers behind Bitcoin and AI possibly be in the tank for such a nakedly fascistic candidate? … is a question you would only ask if you’ve been asleep for the past 15 years.
Are US legislators warming to crypto? The SEC approves Ethereum ETPs, and a crypto bill gets through the House.
As election season kicks into high gear, we need to watch how cryptocurrency companies are influencing US politics.
"Americans aren't confident in crypto. The crypto industry, however, says crypto is very important to Americans."
great to see such hard-hitting journalism from Politico
The anti-enshittification movement rightly criticizes the old, good internet because it wasn't inclusive enough. It was a system almost exclusively hospitable to affluent, privileged people – the people who least needed the liberatory power of technology. Likewise pro-enshittification monopolists – billionaires and their useful idiots – deplore the old, good internet because it gave its users too much power. For them, ad-blocking, alternative clients, mods, reverse-engineering and so on were all bugs, not features. For them, the enshitternet is great because businesses can literally criminalize taking action to protect yourself from their predatory impulses. Superficially, it seems like the pro- and anti-enshittification forces agree – they both agree that the old, good internet was a mistake. But the difference that matters here is that the pro-enshittification side wants everyone mired in the enshitternet forever, living with what Jay Freeman calls "Felony contempt of business-model." By contrast, the disenshittification side wants a new, good internet that gives every user – not just a handful of techies – the power to decide how the digital systems they work use, and to be able to alter or reconfigure them to suit their own needs.