Before announcing his candidacy for the Senate in April 2023, Bernie Moreno was a political household name. A former car salesman in the Cleveland area, his only experience in politics was a 2022 run for another Ohio Senate seat.
Moreno has since achieved the unthinkable.
As part of the Nov. 5 election that returned Donald Trump to the White House, Moreno defeated Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who was first elected to the House in 1992 before winning his Senate seat in 2006 and chairing the powerful Bank job. Committee from 2021.
Moreno’s rise from prominent Ohio businessman to prominent political leader was no accident. His campaign has received $40 million in support from the cryptocurrency industry as part of a highly targeted effort to elect friendly candidates and, perhaps more importantly, remove his critics. Moreno’s victory was one of the Senate seats Republicans flipped to take control of the chamber.
In total, cryptocurrency-related PACs and other industry-related groups raised more than $245 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. According to the nonprofit Public Citizen, cryptocurrency accounted for nearly half of all corporate dollars going into elections. An advocacy group called Stand with Crypto Alliance, which Coinbase launched last year, has developed a scoring system for House and Senate races across the country to help determine where the money should be spent.
Crypto executives, investors, and evangelists saw the election as available for an industry that has spent the past four years trying to grow while being battered repeatedly. According to Stand With Crypto, nearly 300 pro-crypto lawmakers will be represented in the House and Senate, giving the sector unprecedented influence on the legislative agenda.
The cryptocurrency political lobby worked so well this era because it made something as complex as campaign finance simple: raise a ton of cash from a handful of donors and buy ad space on the battlefield to support or smear candidates who support crypto. don’t do it It also required thinking of the candidates as a bit of a binary: They were either pro-industry or anti-industry.
Cryptocurrency companies and their executives quickly mobilized, and they successfully figured out how to deploy their cash through a sophisticated advertising machine across the country. They also picked up hints that big tech had gone wrong. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers after the election, the crypto industry invested in targeting their opponents before the election so they wouldn’t have to deal with them for the next few years.
For more than a year, Moreno has been talked about by Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks on blockchain technology, digital asset policy and the changing terrain of global finance.
“They didn’t go head first,” Moreno said, describing the number of meetings leading up to his run in the primary. “We had to build a lot of confidence.”
He also met with Moreno Coinbase co-founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, as well as policy chief Faryar Shirzad. Armstrong and Ehrsam did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment about the meetings through Coinbase.
Coinbase is the largest digital asset exchange in the United States and has been battling the Securities and Exchange Commission in court for over a year. The company was the cryptocurrency king in 2024, giving more than $75 million to a super PAC called Fairshake. It was one of the best spending committees of any industry during this period, giving only to cryptocurrency supporters running for Congress. Fairshake candidates won almost every race it sponsored in the general election.
“Being anti-crypto is just bad politics,” Coinbase’s Armstrong said He wrote in X After Moreno’s victory.
As the price of bitcoin has increased nearly sixfold in the past four years, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has sued major cryptocurrency players such as Coinbase and Ripple for allegedly selling unregistered securities and avoided working with the companies to draft new specialized rules.
Meanwhile, Sen. Brown has outspokenly opposed crypto-currency Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in targeting cryptocurrency that allegedly funds terrorist organizations including Hamas. Brown has been more vocal in calling for industry crackdowns since the failure of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in late 2022.
With FTX headed for bankruptcy, Brown retweeted a November 10 Senate Banking Committee memo calling the incident “a loud warning bell that cryptocurrencies can fail” and “could have ripple effects on consumers and other parts of our financial system.” “
The two-way Fairshake He won all but three races in the general election, spending heavily to keep Republicans and Democrats fighting for key seats. Protect Progress, a PAC affiliated with Fairshake, has given more than $10 million to Democratic candidates for Senate in Arizona and Michigan. Both won. Another of Fairshake’s PACs, Defend American Jobs, has spent more than $3 million to support West Virginia Republican Jim Justice, who will fill Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s former seat when the new session begins in 2025.
In California, Democratic Rep. Kathy Porter Fairshake lost a Senate primary after spending more than $10 million. ads against him.
“I was like, ‘What’s a Fairshake?’ I was like” Porter This was reported by The New Yorker.
How the technology brothers made their choice
Moreno scrutinizers wanted to understand what he would do differently from the current administration and regulatory regime, the senator-elect told CNBC in an interview.
“These are people who know how to vet investments, they know how to vet people, and they took the same discipline that I did,” Moreno said.
This helped him found a blockchain startup called Champ Titles, a company that digitizes the sale and registration of car tickets.
“What they didn’t want was to put time, effort and energy behind someone who was going to end up being disappointed,” Moreno said.
A spokeswoman for Andreessen and Horowitz, who co-founded a venture firm bearing their name, declined to comment. Sacks, the founder of Craft Ventures, did not respond to CNBC’s request for an interview.
Coinbase’s Shirzad met Moreno over breakfast in Washington this spring. Shirzad told CNBC in an interview that Moreno was not an expert on the details of the policy issues he would be implementing, but he had a solid understanding of cryptocurrency technology and how it could be applied.
“It was a really great meeting between me as a politician and him as a businessman who sees the potential of technology,” Shirzad said.
David McIntosh, an early supporter of Moreno’s Senate bid and president of the Club for Growth, a conservative organization that focuses on American economic issues, said Moreno was out of cash after spending everything he had on a difficult and expensive primary. McIntosh said Fairshake was crucial to Moreno’s campaign that began in the summer.
Moreno’s victory over Brown “sent a really strong signal to Washington that voters are going to support pro-blockchain candidates,” McIntosh said.
McIntosh noted that the Club for Growth spent $6.5 million to help Moreno with early-stage advertising through various super PACs, including the Bitcoin Freedom Fund.
Brown’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Brown told Politico he hasn’t ruled out a run for Ohio Vice President-elect JD Vance’s open Senate seat, which will be filled in a special election in 2026.
Moreno benefited from positioning himself as a candidate for “change,” while Brown “became a defender of the status quo,” Shirzad said.
“Crypto is thematically about change,” Shirzad said. “It appeals not only to the younger demographic, but also to voters who want to change.”
Fairshake declined to comment on whether Brown would spend to block another Senate run, but the super PAC has already raised $78 million for the 2026 midterm elections.
“We’ve stuck to our core strategy from Day 1, supporting pro-crypto candidates and opposing those who play politics and win with jobs and innovation,” Fairshake told CNBC.
‘The Biggest Cryptocurrency Congress Ever’
The past two election cycles have featured spending by bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison In prison in March for stealing more than $8 billion in customer money through FTX.
This year’s list of contributors was more robust, but saw large amounts of funding come from companies that have been at odds with SEC Chairman Gensler for years. This includes Coinbase and blockchain giant Ripple Labs. Andreessen Horowitz, a well-known venture fund with a large portfolio of crypto companies, was another major contributor.
Many of the big names in cryptocurrencies also gave significantly in 2024.
FEC documents show Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss was among the biggest individual crypto donors this election cycle. giving a total of 10.1 million dollars. Ripple’s top executives contributed millions to this round, led by billionaire founder Chris Larsen, who gave about $12 million.
Coinbase CEO Armstrong gave more than $1.3 million to a mix of PACs, including Fairshake and JD Vance for Senate Inc. He also gave directly to Democrats and Republicans vying for seats in the House and Senate. Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Gwal has attended at least two Trump fundraisers, including one one in NashvilleTennessee, on the edge of the biggest bitcoin event of the year.
Chairman of the Kraken Jesse Powell Donated more than $1 million to Trump’s campaign.
Other individual crypto contributors include former Bitfinex head of strategy Phil Potter (over $1.6 million), Multicoin Capital Kyle Samani ($878,600), Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam ($735,400), partner at Union Square Ventures Fred Wilson ($1.4 million), Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla ($198,500), CEO of BitGo Mike Belshe ($119,825), Co-founder of Solana Anatoly Yakovenko ($67,100) and founder of Xapo Bank Wences Casares ($374,899).
this week, Armstrong reports met with the president-elect to discuss appointments. Within a day, there was talk about the potential of the White House the first crypto czar. By the end of the week, Gensler, SEC chairman and longtime cryptocurrency foe whose term does not expire until June 2026, announced his retirement on inauguration day.
One of Trump’s campaign promises to crypto enthusiasts was that if elected, he would fire the head of the SEC and appoint crypto-friendly regulators. Gensler may have looked at the pressure he was facing in Washington and decided it wasn’t worth relieving.
“Welcome to America’s biggest cryptocurrency convention ever,” Armstrong said. He wrote in X on November 5.