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.
