Close your eyes and make a list of the most important questions in the 2024 election. Maybe you’ve thought about the cost of living, abortion, immigration, democracy, climate change, gun violence, the war in Gaza, the Supreme Court. If you’re like the vast majority of voters, the word you probably haven’t thought of is “cryptocurrency.”

But last year, the cryptocurrency the industry has quietly become the biggest corporate spender in the entire 2024 election. According to a report Nearly half of the $274 million in corporate money brought into this year’s election came from crypto companies, according to the nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen. For comparison, the second biggest spender, Koch Industries — the company made famous by Jane Mayer’s opus Black silver – gave $40 million to his Super PAC, Americans for Prosperity Action. Koch’s company and PAC employees spent only about $6 million on electing Republicans. Congress.

After its 2024 spending spree, the crypto industry’s cash is on track to account for 15% of all known corporate contributions since the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens unitedthe monitoring group discovered.

The scale of the spending “is unprecedented and unlike anything we’ve seen before,” said Rick Claypool, author of the report for Public Citizen. He likens it to “a political and financial death star that simply targets candidates and races.” The industry’s donations appear both intended to fulfill its narrow political agenda — a demand for light regulation in Washington — and to strike fear into the hearts of candidates about the possibility of spending against them.

If crypto regulations haven’t solved your top 10 election issues, you’re not alone. For many people in Washington, it didn’t register. At the Democratic National Convention in July, I spoke with a Treasury Department official who simply shrugged his shoulders when I asked him if he was concerned about the crypto industry’s growing influence in Washington . Who represents them? » asked the staff member. Can you think of a single senator or congressman who works to advance their interests? I couldn’t.

Cryptocurrencies, or digital currencies, have until now been an afterthought – or worse – in Washington. Just ask Bernie Morenothe new senator from Ohio. “Ten years ago, it was the laughing stock of the tech world,” Moreno said of the crypto industry in October. “Here we are 10 years later, and they will be decisive in helping the Republicans win the United States. Senate.”

And they were: This cycle, crypto industry Super PACs invested $133 million in federal races across the country. The industry spent more than $40 million on the Ohio Senate race, where it helped unseat the crypto-skeptical chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

There’s a reason crypto hasn’t been at the top of the list so far for most politicians or voters: it has no real use case or intrinsic value. On the other hand, according to the Pew Research Center, about 17 percent of American adults report owning cryptocurrency – a figure that has remained relatively stable over the past three years.

In recent years, several crypto companies have exploded over allegations of fraud or that they operated as Ponzi schemes. Under the Biden administration, the industry has faced unprecedented scrutiny, as regulators have targeted some of the crypto sector’s most prominent companies — including Coinbase and Ripple — for allegedly selling securities not recorded. Some industry players printed tons of cash and began deploying it in an attempt to position themselves as powerful players.

At the time I had this conversation this summer, the industry, led by Coinbase and Ripple, was already aggressively campaigning to ensure that politicians would start taking cryptocurrency very seriously. This campaign began in earnest last February, when Fairshake, the leading crypto industry-funded Super PAC, began pouring money into the California Senate primary, in a determined effort to ensure the defeat of progressive Orange County Congresswoman Katie Porter. There were two oddities about this investment. On the one hand, although Porter was not an ally of the industry, she was not a particularly vocal critic of crypto; on the other hand, she was already expected to lose.

Fairshake ended up spending more than $10 million — about a third of the total Porter raised for his Senate bid — on ads attacking Porter’s character. As a person familiar with the PAC’s strategy explained to New Yorkers Earlier this year, the group had an explicit goal in mind, and it wasn’t just to make sure Porter lost. It was about “terrifying other politicians – “warning everyone running for office that if you’re anti-crypto, the industry will come after you.”

Fairshake appeared to replicate this strategy when he entered other races in which progressive incumbents without significant policy positions on crypto were already headed for losses: Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both of whom were targeted by another interest group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC, because of their criticism of Israel. (Fairshake did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, crypto PACs did not target their most vocal critic in Congress, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was up for re-election this year.

“She is perhaps the strongest opponent of crypto on the Hill, her Republican challenger essentially ran on a cryptocurrency platform and, despite this, he received no support from the main crypto PAC -currency…And he lost his race by a huge margin,” says Molly White, who writes about the crypto industry in her Citation Needed newsletter. “Part of what was happening here was they were trying to support the winners so they could then come and say, ‘Look, we swept (the races we competed in).'”

Now that the dust has settled on the 2024 election, a picture is beginning to emerge of the success of the industry’s efforts: the three candidates Fairshake spent against, according to a report from Open Secrets — Porter, Bowman and Bush — were defeated, while only 4 of the 26 candidates they supported lost their races. (Two of those elections remain uncalled, and two other PAC-backed candidates are not running for re-election this year.)

So, after spending all this money, what does the industry really want? “If you look at the biggest spenders of these super PACs, virtually every single one of them has some sort of enforcement action — or even multiple enforcement actions — open against them,” White says.

For years, the standard line has been that the industry wanna clear regulations – in reality, businesses want more favorable regulations and regulators.

White explains, “When you actually look at how they’ve responded to both the enforcement of existing regulations and the proposed regulations, it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny that they actually want regulations, because they’ve been adamantly opposed to the application of very standard regulations. financial regulations on their products so far. Almost every time legislation or a proposal is introduced that aims to regulate the industry or provide more consumer protections, they vehemently oppose it.

Generally speaking, at present, all Bitcoin-related companies are regulated by the commodity regulator, while the Securities and Exchange Commission has generally argued that other cryptocurrencies should be regulated by the SEC itself – a position that cryptocurrency companies generally oppose and actively contest. in several cases currently being litigated, White says.

During his candidacy for 2024, the president-elect Donald Trump has actively courted crypto companies, billing himself as “the president of crypto.” He pledged to make America “the crypto capital of the planet and the global bitcoin superpower,” demanding that crypto be mined only in the United States – despite its massive energy consumption and negative local impacts.

Trump has pledged to quickly fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler and replace him with an industry-friendly regulator.

Now that Trump has won and the Republicans have secured a trifecta of government in Washington, the crypto industry appears to have gained the favorable regulatory environment it spent so much money on. And he’s not resting on his laurels: Fairshake has already done it $78 million available for the next cycle.