Crypto PACs Spend $176 Million on Midterms, but Legislation Lags

Crypto lobbying groups have spent roughly $176 million across more than 100 congressional races ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. midterms, according to a Reuters review. The figure represents the industry's second consecutive cycle of concentrated political spending — and the second test of whether campaign dollars can be converted into statutes.

The record so far is mixed. The industry's money has proven effective at electing allies, and markedly less effective at passing the laws it prefers.

Who is spending, and where?

Fairshake, the industry's largest super PAC, leads the effort. Its network deployed $150.8 million on races this cycle through Oct. 20, and candidates it backed won 53 of 58 primary and special election campaigns. Its principal funders are Coinbase Global, Ripple — the issuer of XRP — and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

For scale, the $176 million total across the cycle exceeds the roughly $133 million Fairshake spent across 68 races in 2024. That earlier cycle included an extraordinary $40 million single-race expenditure to unseat Sherrod Brown, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

The strategy has also shifted from a partisan tilt toward a bipartisan bloc. Fairshake is currently backing 32 House incumbents: 19 Republicans and 13 Democrats. The spread reflects an operational calculation — divided government makes single-party dependence a liability.

What did the 2024 spending actually buy?

The Brown defeat is the industry's clearest return on investment. Following that race, Congress passed the Genius Act, a 2025 federal law establishing rules for stablecoins.

Yet the Genius Act left unresolved one of the industry's top priorities: who may receive the interest earned on reserve assets backing stablecoins. That question was meant to be settled by the Clarity Act, which would have divided oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission while setting broader market-structure rules.

The Clarity Act failed to advance. At its Sept. 15 cloture vote, the bill secured only 49 of the 60 votes required in the Senate. The principal sticking point was not market structure at all — it was proposed ethics rules restricting government officials from profiting from crypto. In plain words: the industry's money elected sympathetic legislators, but a dispute over official ethics still stalled its flagship bill.

Does crypto actually need a friendly Congress?

The historical record complicates the industry's own premises. In 2023, the SEC brought 46 enforcement actions against crypto actors — the highest count in any single year. That same year, Bitcoin rose 155%.

Conversely, in 2025, Donald Trump was widely described as the "crypto president," with an administration far more receptive to the industry's requests and donations. Bitcoin nonetheless sold off and entered a bear market in early October of that year.

These two data points suggest that regulatory hostility has not reliably suppressed asset performance, and regulatory friendliness has not reliably supported it. The market has moved through its own cycles regardless of which party held power.

That caveat cuts both ways, and it deserves emphasis: an overtly hostile Congress could make a revised Clarity Act harder to pass, yet fears that crypto will be banned or suffocated by burdensome rules have historically exceeded what materialized.

What happens after Nov. 3?

The immediate question is whether the Fairshake network's roughly $150.8 million produces a Congress willing to revive the Clarity Act — and whether its senators can resolve the ethics-language dispute that consumed 11 votes' worth of support in September.

The industry's own track record argues for restraint in expectations. One major law, the Genius Act, followed two cycles and more than a quarter-billion dollars in cumulative spending, and even that statute deferred the reserve-interest question it was supposed to answer.

Investors and operators should also weigh the sector's performance paradox: the strongest enforcement year on record coincided with the strongest annual asset gain. Election outcomes may matter less for crypto's trajectory than the industry's spending implies.

The Nov. 3 midterms will determine the composition of the next Congress. The harder test — passing a workable successor to the Clarity Act before the ethics dispute hardens into a permanent blocker — begins the day after.