Crypto’s $245 million campaign finance operation filled airwaves with ads not about crypto
Stand With Crypto’s bus tour through five battleground states kicked off last week in Phoenix and Las Vegas.
Logan Dobson/Stand With Crypto Alliance
LAS VEGAS — In Nevada’s 4th Congressional District, a crypto PAC spent nearly $2 million on ads this cycle to support the reelection of Steven Horsford, a Democratic congressman who’s voted in favor of some major pro-crypto bills.
But watching the ads, you’d learn nothing about that agenda.
“He’s leading on jobs, bringing good paying union jobs to Nevada and rebuilding our infrastructure,” one 30-second commercial says. “He capped insulin prices at $35 a month” and “worked multiple jobs to support his hard-working single mother and siblings.”
The ad wraps up with the disclosure, “Fairshake is responsible for the content of this ad.”
Fairshake was the largest crypto-aligned super PAC in the 2024 election cycle, spending piles of cash to support crypto allies and vote out antagonists across the country. The group brought in $170 million, accounting for a huge chunk of the amount raised by crypto-related PACs and other groups, which totaled more than $245 million, according to Federal Election Commission data.
Crypto has accounted for nearly half of all corporate money flowing into the election, according to a report from nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen. No other sector is close. That includes oil companies and banks, which have historically been big political contributors. Crypto even outpaced Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who spent tens of millions of dollars to try to get Republican nominee former President Donald Trump back in the White House in his contest against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
A big part of the crypto industry’s strategy when it came to distributing cash was to identify key races and then flood the zone.
Industry advocacy group Stand With Crypto Alliance, launched by Coinbase last year, developed a grading system for the presidential race and for House and Senate candidates across the country, helping it determine where to spend.
Horsford received an A grade based on his public comments and his voting history while in office. His campaign received money from Fairshake as well as individual donations from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, venture capitalist and longtime crypto investor Reid Hoffman, and billionaire twins Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss.
Nevada is home to two of the thirteen “critical elections” singled out by Stand with Crypto, a designation the group defines as races that are “critical to the future of crypto in America.” In addition to Horsford’s election, the other Nevada race is the Senate contest between Democratic incumbent Jackie Rosen and Republican challenger Sam Brown. Both candidates received an A grade.
According to data shared by Stand with Crypto, 385,000 Nevadans are crypto owners, and more than 16,000 people in the state have signed up to be advocates for the group, which made a stop in Las Vegas in September as part of a multi-state tour.
The other races deemed critical were for Senate in Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin and Maryland, and for specific House contests in Colorado, Iowa and Oregon.
To reach potential voters, Fairshake isn’t talking a lot about crypto. Nor are its affiliate PACs, which have names like Defend American Jobs and Protect Progress. They’ve collectively spent more than $135 million this cycle, mostly on ads.
“Not mentioning crypto assets explicitly is probably a savvy move to avoid alienating voters who prefer traditional currencies and might be put off by connections to crypto,” said David Nickerson, an associate professor of political science at Temple University who worked in the analytics department for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.
The biggest single target of crypto money this cycle was Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Democratic chair of the Senate Banking Committee. Brown backed Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in holding hearings on whether digital tokens were tied to terrorism.
In December, Brown told journalists that he wasn’t concerned about the crypto industry’s rumblings against him.
“Bring ’em on,” Politico quoted Brown as saying to a crowd of reporters.
Some $40 million of crypto money has been directed at defeating Brown, and one PAC has paid for five ads designed to boost awareness of Republican rival Bernie Moreno, a blockchain entrepreneur. The race is crucial in determining which party will control the Senate.
Protect Progress, a PAC affiliated with Fairshake, has given more than $10 million apiece to Senate candidates in Arizona and Michigan. In Arizona, the group favors Democrat Ruben Gallego, who is vying for the seat being vacated by Kyrsten Sinema. In Michigan, the preferred choice is Elissa Slotkin, who is currently a Democratic House member.
Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of California lost in the primary for Senate after Fairshake spent over $10 million in ads against her. Defend American Jobs spent more than $3 million to support Republican Jim Justice in West Virginia, who has been declared the winner, replacing exiting Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
WATCH: Jay Clayton on regulation
LAS VEGAS — The bitcoin treasury play that lifted Strategy’s market cap past $80 billion is now being mimicked by meme stock companies, media firms, and multinational conglomerates. But Wall Street isn’t buying all the hype.
This week, Trump Media announced plans to raise $2.5 billion to buy bitcoin, and GameStop revealed a $500 million allocation. Meanwhile, Tether, SoftBank, and Strike’s Jack Mallers unveiled Twenty One, a bitcoin-native public company expected to launch with more than 42,000 bitcoin on its balance sheet, enough to make it the third-largest corporate holder of the asset globally.
For now, the market doesn’t see the next Strategy in any of them. Trump Media shares have dropped more than 20% since the announcement, while GameStop is down nearly 17%. Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, has multiplied by 26 times since the end of 2022, amassing a bitcoin stake worth over $60 billion.
“Maybe the market wanted them to buy more bitcoin,” said Strategy Chairman Michael Saylor in an interview at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas. “But these are short-term dynamics. Over the long term, bitcoin on the balance sheet has proven to be extraordinarily popular.”
Saylor called Trump Media’s move “courageous, aggressive, and intelligent” — and said the flood of similar announcements marks a global shift in corporate finance.
“Everywhere I go at this conference, someone says, you know, I’m working on a bitcoin treasury company in Hong Kong. I’m doing this thing in Korea. I’ve got this thing I’m working on in Abu Dhabi. We’re going to do this in the Middle East, you know, we’ve got this in the U.K.,“ he said. “There’s an explosion of interest right now.”
Saylor said bitcoin ambassadors are “planting the orange flag everywhere on earth.”
What began as a fringe financial maneuver is quickly becoming a geopolitical race. Under the Biden administration, corporate bitcoin adoption was often treated as a regulatory red flag. But under President Donald Trump, the tone has changed.
In March, Trump signed an executive order establishing a U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, instructing federal agencies to treat bitcoin as a long-term store of value. The reserve will be funded entirely through bitcoin seized in criminal and civil forfeiture cases, according to White House Crypto and AI Czar David Sacks. The order also empowers the government to explore additional budget-neutral mechanisms for acquiring more bitcoin.
For the first time, the federal government will conduct a full audit of its digital asset holdings, currently estimated at more than 200,000 bitcoin. The order explicitly prohibits the sale of any bitcoin from the reserve, cementing its role as a permanent sovereign asset.
‘No force on Earth’
Vice President JD Vance this week became the first sitting vice president to address the bitcoin community directly, framing crypto as a hedge against inflation, censorship, and “unelected bureaucrats.” And in a further move to boost bitcoin, the Department of Labor rolled back guidance that had discouraged bitcoin investments in retirement plans.
“No force on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come,” Saylor said. “Bitcoin is digital capital and maybe the most explosive idea of the era.“
Some corners of the corporate world are still resistant. Late last year, Microsoft shareholders rejected a proposal to use some of the software company’s massive cash pile to follow Saylor’s lead. In a video presentation supporting the effort, Saylor told investors that “Microsoft can’t afford to miss the next technology wave.”
While Strategy has reaped the rewards of early adoption, Saylor suggested the market’s cooler reaction to Trump Media and GameStop may stem more from structural financing dynamics than from skepticism toward bitcoin itself.
He pointed to GameStop’s initial announcement that it was considering a bitcoin strategy, which led to a 50% pop in the stock and tenfold increase in trading volume. The company quickly capitalized on the momentum with a $1.5 billion convertible bond raise — a move he described as “extraordinarily successful.” Trump Media took a similar approach, raising capital through a large convertible bond offering.
Saylor said those financing methods can create short-term downward pressure, but that over time investors will benefit.
When it comes to Strategy, Saylor said there’s no ceiling to his bitcoin accumulation plans. His company is already by far the largest corporate holder of the cryptocurrency.
“We’ll keep buying bitcoin,” he told CNBC. “We expect the price of bitcoin will keep going up. We think it will get exponentially harder to buy bitcoin, but we will work exponentially more efficiently to buy bitcoin.”
For critics who worry that state and media actors embracing bitcoin will undermine its decentralized ideals, Saylor argues the opposite.
“The network is very anti-fragile, and there’s a balance of power here,” he said. “The more actors that come into the ecosystem, the more diverse, the more distributed the protocol is, the more incorruptible it becomes, the more robust it becomes, and so that means the more trustworthy it becomes to larger economic actors who otherwise would be afraid to put all of their economic weight on the network.”
WATCH: Bitcoin heads for winning month despite return of trade war fears: CNBC Crypto World
More than $14 billion in US renewable and EV investments and 10,000 new jobs have been scrapped or put on hold since January, according to a new analysis from E2 and the Clean Economy Tracker. The reason: growing fears that the Republican-majority Congress will pull the plug on federal clean energy tax credits.
In April alone, companies backed out of $4.5 billion in battery, EV, and wind projects right before the House passed a sweeping tax and spending bill that would gut the federal tax incentives fueling the clean energy boom. E2 also found another $1.5 billion in previously unreported project cancellations from earlier in the year.
Now, with the Senate preparing to take up the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” E2 says over 10,000 clean energy jobs have already vanished.
“If the tax plan passed by the House last week becomes law, expect to see construction and investments stopping in states across the country as more projects and jobs are cancelled,” said Michael Timberlake, E2’s communications director. “Businesses are now counting on Congress to come to its senses and stop this costly attack on an industry that is essential to meeting America’s growing energy demand and that’s driving unprecedented economic growth in every part of the country.”
Ironically, it’s Republican-led congressional districts – the biggest beneficiaries of the Biden administration’s clean energy tax credits passed in 2022 – that are feeling the most pain. So far, more than $12 billion in investments and over 13,000 jobs have been canceled in GOP districts.
Through April, 61% of all clean energy projects, 72% of jobs, and 82% of investments have been in Republican districts.
Despite the rising number of cancellations, some companies are still forging ahead. In April, businesses announced nearly $500 million in new clean energy investments across six states. That includes a $400 million expansion by Corning in Michigan to make solar wafers, which is expected to create at least 400 jobs, and a $9.3 million investment from a Canadian solar equipment company in North Carolina.
If completed, the seven projects announced last month could create nearly 3,000 permanent jobs.
To date, E2 has tracked 390 major clean energy projects across 42 states and Puerto Rico since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August 2022. In total, companies plan to invest $132 billion and hire 123,000 permanent workers.
But the report warns that momentum could grind to a halt if the House tax plan becomes law. Since the clean energy tax credits were signed into law, 45 announced projects have been canceled, downsized, or closed entirely, wiping out nearly 20,000 jobs and $16.7 billion in investments.
What’s more, Trump’s Department of Energy announced today that it was killing more than $3.7 billion in funding for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and decarbonization initiatives. Eighteen out of 24 projects were awarded through DOE’s Industrial Demonstrations Program (IDP), which was made law in the Inflation Reduction Act. It aimed to strengthen the economic competitiveness of US manufacturers in global markets demanding lower carbon emissions, while supporting US manufacturing jobs and communities.
Executive Director Jason Walsh of the BlueGreen Alliance said in a statement in response to today’s DOE announcement:
The awarded projects that DOE is seeking to kill are concentrated in rural areas and red states. American manufacturers are hungry to partner with the federal government to bolster US industry. The IDP saw $60 billion worth of applications during the program selection process, a ten-times oversubscription.
President Trump claims to be a champion of American manufacturing, but today’s announcement is further evidence that he and his Secretary of Energy are liars.
Read more: Global energy giant RWE halts US offshore wind because of Trump
If you live in an area that has frequent natural disaster events, and are interested in making your home more resilient to power outages, consider going solar and adding a battery storage system. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. They have hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisers to help you every step of the way. Get started here. –trusted affiliate link*
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
A Tesla prototype was spotted at the Fremont factory in California, sparking speculation that it’s the new “cheaper Tesla”, but it looks like a regular Model Y.
A drone operator flew over the Fremont factory this week and spotted a Tesla prototype with light camouflage on the front and back ends.
The vehicle is making a lot of people talk on social media and the media as many think it could be a new “affordable model” coming to Tesla.
Other than the camouflage, the vehicle looks just like a regular Model Y:
It’s likely one of two things: a new “stripped-down Model Y” or a Model Y Performance.
Model Y Performance is the only version that Tesla hasn’t launched since the design changeover earlier this year.
The “stripped-down Model Y” is what will replace Tesla’s upcoming “affordable models.”
We have been reporting on this new vehicle program from Tesla for a while now.
It came to life just over a year ago as a pivot for Tesla after CEO Elon Musk canceled two cheaper vehicles that Tesla was working on, commonly referred as “the $25,000 Tesla”. Those vehicles were codenamed NV91 and NV92, and they were based on the new vehicle platform that Tesla is now reserving for the Cybercab.
Instead, Musk saw that Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y production lines were starting to be underutilized as Tesla faced demand issues. Therefore, Tesla canceled the vehicles program based on the new platform and decided to build new vehicles on Model 3/Y platform using the same production lines.
We previously reported that these electric vehicles will likely look very similar to Model 3 and Model Y.
In recent months, several other media reports reinforced that, and Tesla all but confirmed it during its latest earnings call.
Considering this looks like a regular Model Y, it could be the new cheaper and less feature rich Model Y:
Some people are claiming that this vehicle looks smaller than the Model Y, but it’s difficult to tell as the black camouflage on the ends can confuse the eye.
It looks like a very similar size when it passes near other Tesla vehicles:
What do you think it is? Let us know in the comment section below.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway