Just over two years ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was still wandering the halls of Capitol Hill, doling out campaign donations and convincing lawmakers to pass crypto legislation. Today, of course, he’s waiting out his appeal in a Brooklyn federal detention center with Diddy, but in a cruel twist of fate, his vision came true, two years too late: The U.S. finally had its crypto election.
When Coinbase picked up the mantle from SBF and launched its “Stand with Crypto Alliance” in August 2023, I was skeptical, to say the least, of the existence of a single “crypto voter,” let alone the 50 million Americans that Coinbase cited as a potential bloc. And I would argue that Coinbase—and the rest of the companies and VCs that joined the entente, from the Winklevii to a16z crypto—largely agree. When their affiliated Super PACs spent tens of millions of dollars on ads in crucial battleground races, they avoided mentioning crypto altogether.
And yet, crypto won, all the way to the top of the ticket. There have already been gallons of spilled ink on how the MAGA Silicon Valley contingent shepherded Trump to his second term, but crypto served as the vanguard for making tech’s rightward shift more politically palatable. Figures like Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong have been in open battle with the Biden administration—and especially SEC chair Gary Gensler—for more than a year, after all.
After referring to Bitcoin as a “scam” as recently as 2021, Trump embraced the crypto industry’s prodigious wallets, even if his own foray into memecoins hasn’t quite paid out. He spoke at a flagship crypto conference, visited a Bitcoin bar in New York, and pledged to commute the sentence of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, a sign of how deep down the rabbit hole he really went. We’ll see if he keeps his promises.
Downticket, buoyed by enough campaign donations to make SBF blush, pro-crypto candidates won across both parties—261 in the House, according to Stand with Crypto, and 17 in the Senate. Several of the industry’s greatest foes, including Ohio senator and banking committee chair Sherrod Brown, lost, paving the way for blockchain legislation to have a chance of passing next session, or even during a lame-duck compromise.
And then there’s the rise of electoral betting markets, with the crypto-powered Polymarket and Kalshi predicting a Trump victory nearly the whole way, even when polls divined a toss-up or Harris edge. As I told Allie yesterday, probabilities are not exactly a sound way to gauge accuracy, but prediction markets certainly enjoyed their mainstream ascendancy. “The global truth machine is here, powered by the people,” wrote 26-year-old founder and CEO Shayne Coplan on Twitter.
So what does it all mean? Crypto is nowhere close to an issue that Americans care about like immigration or inflation, yet it was an indisputable driving force—and winner—of the 2024 election. The industry will likely now have a hand in deciding the economic policy of the next four years, from the upending of nearly a century of securities regulation to the injection of stablecoins into the monetary system to choosing Gensler’s replacement. You probably still won’t pay for coffee with Dogecoin anytime soon, but crypto could reshape our infrastructure. Somewhere in Brooklyn, a monkey’s paw is unfurling for SBF.
I’ll be writing Term Sheet for the next couple of weeks, and I promise it won’t all be about crypto! Please send me story ideas and tips, or just say hi, at leo.schwartz@fortune.com.
Leo Schwartz
Twitter: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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