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By The RepresentUs Team April 1, 2025 |
The Promise of Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency, or crypto, is a monetary technology that emerged in the early 2010s–Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, and Dogecoin are just a few of the notable cryptocurrencies you might have seen in the headlines over the years thanks to reports about the ballooning price of cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin at its peak reached over $100,000 per coin) and because of stories about investors becoming crypto millionaires overnight.
Champions of cryptocurrency would claim that the decentralized blockchain technology that powers crypto would allow adopters to engage in secure transactions anonymously and directly, bypassing the need for banks and other central financial institutions.
It sounds like an interesting idea and maybe even a compelling one, but the reality hasn’t really worked out that way. Instead, there are very few things you can actually buy with crypto and it has functioned more as a commodity or speculative asset (like gold) rather than an actual currency.
And the industry behind crypto? They’ve acted more like any other industry that spends millions to buy political influence to rewrite the rules in their favor.
The Scandals of Crypto
Recent polls show that there is very little trust in crypto. More than 60% of Americans think that crypto is not reliable or safe. Only 5% of Americans are “extremely confident” in crypto.
Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam… I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar.
–President Trump in a 2021 interview with Fox Business
A lot of the distrust in crypto can be attributed to the sheer number of scams. The FBI reported that Americans lost a staggering $5.6 billion to crypto scams in 2023.
Perhaps the most well-known scam was the one perpetrated by Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto exchange company FTX, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for stealing $8 billion from his customers.
Prior to getting caught, Bankman-Fried had used money he stole from customers to make more than $100 million in political donations ahead of the 2022 U.S. midterms. His campaign contributions made him one of the biggest donors that year.
And Bankman-Fried is just the tip of the iceberg. The crypto industry has been pouring massive amounts of money into politics in order to influence policy and get preferred candidates elected.
Crypto’s Big Spending in Politics
Despite, or perhaps because of, the low public trust in crypto, the companies and big money players in the crypto industry have been spending obscene amounts of money to lobby Congress and get their preferred candidates elected.
During the 2024 election cycle, the crypto industry spent a total of $238 million, outspending the oil and gas and pharmaceutical industries, two industries that usually come to mind when we think of big political spending.
All of this spending paid off big time. 85% of Congressional candidates backed by the crypto industry won in 2024. As a result, a majority of the U.S. Senate and over 270 Members of the House of Representatives (out of 435) are considered friendly to the crypto industry.
Image source: Public Citizen
This pro-crypto shift became highly visible in Ohio’s fiercely contested Senate race, where the crypto industry set its sights on unseating incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown. Brown, a vocal advocate for increased crypto regulation who had previously opposed pro-crypto legislation, faced targeted opposition from the industry, which backed his Republican challenger, Bernie Moreno.
Crypto groups were spending nearly $800,000 per day to bombard Ohioans with anti-Brown TV ads. Fairshake (a super PAC funded by crypto companies) alone spent $40 million to defeat Brown. And it worked. Moreno would go on to defeat Brown by 3.6% in what became one of the most expensive Senate races of all time. Now in office, Moreno has said he will support loosening regulations on crypto assets.
And they’re not done. Already, large crypto companies have given the super PAC Fairshake nearly $80 million and counting to use in the 2026 elections.
Crypto in the White House
Despite once calling Bitcoin a scam, President Trump has embraced crypto in a big way during the start of his second term in office.
The $TRUMP coin. In early January 2025 both President Trump and Melania Trump launched their own crypto coins. At its launch, the $TRUMP coin rose 300% before swiftly crashing. The Trumps made over $100 million from trading fees while thousands of people lost money.
Individuals who do crypto business with the Trumps are also reaping the benefits. In 2023, the SEC had charged a businessman named Justin Sun with fraud for manipulating the price of a cryptocurrency, but right after Trump’s election, Sun had pumped $75 million into a Trump family-owned crypto venture called World Liberty Financial. His injection ignited a buying spree that ultimately netted the Trumps nearly $400 million. At the end of February 2025, the SEC had put a pause on the case against Sun.
The FBI reported that Americans lost a staggering $5.6 billion to crypto scams in 2023.
Crypto businesses can benefit from a relationship with the White House, too. In 2023, SEC had sued the crypto company Kraken for allegedly operating as an “unregistered securities exchange”. The SEC had also sued the crypto company Coinbase for similar reasons in 2023. When Trump came to office after the 2024 election, both Kraken and Coinbase, along with many other companies, had given $1million+ to Trump’s inauguration fund. Not too long after, the SEC announced it was dropping its lawsuits against Kraken and Coinbase.
Pro-crypto billionaires wield big influence. Billionaire Peter Thiel (a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia alongside Elon Musk and Trump’s new “Crypto Czar” David Sacks) doesn’t believe that “freedom and democracy are compatible”. Since his PayPal days, he’s gone on to make investments and fortunes in crypto and fund many political candidates (including President Trump and Vice President Vance) who would be allies in cutting spending and slashing regulations with the goal of completely remaking the American government.
A Bitcoin Strategic Reserve? Trump recently signed an executive order that would consolidate all the cryptocurrency the government has acquired over the years from criminal enterprises and civil forfeitures and hold it in reserve in the same way that the government holds oil and gold in reserve. Whether or not this is a good idea is up for debate, but what’s not up for debate is the fact that four senior Trump officials hold nearly $8 million in cryptocurrency and saw their investments rise after this announcement.
What do we do?
The crypto industry is just another example of how big money and the wealthy few have taken over the political system to get what they want, at the expense of everyday Americans.
When our institutions and our representatives let us down, it’s on We The People to act. That’s why we’re building a nationwide movement to make the government more accountable to the needs of the American people. Sign up with us and find out how you can get involved.