Did Crypto Help Reelect Donald Trump? | Cointelegraph Documentary

What really pushed Donald Trump and the Republicans over the line in last year's election? Was it going on Joe Rogan? Was it the failed assassination attempt? Was it Joe Biden's brain freeze? Or was it the crypto industry? After Trump's victory last November, we went on a journey to look for answers. We spent the last few months conducting interviews and pouring over campaign finance records. And here's what we found.

Power.

It all comes down to power. Power isn't given, it's taken. Or at least that's the conventional wisdom. But what if it isn't? What if power, real political power, can be given?

There's no doubt that the efforts of this lobbying group that we back, Fair Shake, along with some other leaders in the crypto space, had a big impact in 2024.

A new player stepped onto the field. Not a candidate, not a party, but in industry.

The funding from the crypto industry in my particular race was actually Decisive.

With over $170 million in political donations, crypto didn't just show up. It helped flip seats, shape Congress, and maybe even tilt the outcome of a presidential election.

Their support definitely played a substantial role in my victory.

This is the story about power, about how it flows, how it's wielded, and how in 2024, it was bought, negotiated and given. This is the story of crypto's role in the 2024 election. As you may have heard, there was an election in the United States last year. It came at a turbulent time for the country. Economically, it was a time of inflation and general malaise. But one industry had been on an upward trend since 2009, the year of its creation. In just 15 years, it had grown from literally nothing to a financial ecosystem with millions of enthusiastic participants. We started the year with the Bitcoin ETF being approved in the United States. The price of a single bitcoin has climbed above $100,000. For the first time, MicroStrategy has bought about $8.3 billion worth of Bitcoin.

I believe that cryptocurrencies are the future.

At one point, the Trump coin rocketing from six and a half dollars to more than 72. The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world. Before the election, however, crypto had a political problem.

This is a field rife with fraud, rife with hucksters.

I just want to make sure that it's not open for terrorists and drug traffickers and traffickers in Iran. And as a problem, this was a serious One, we are really going from.

Such an extreme position of probably the most demonized industry that I can remember in a few decades in the U.S. remember, there was a sitting senator who declared a war on crypto, which is not something that senators should generally do against entire industries that are trying to operate within the law.

I was very disappointed with Chairman Gensler's approach during his essentially four years in office for President Biden. He was hostile towards innovation, hostile towards the expanding use of blockchain and tokenization of real world assets, and of course, very hostile towards crypto. And as a result, America fell behind.

We do a survey of financial advisors and financial professionals every year, asking them what's preventing them from investing in crypto. And people outside the industry might assume that, that it's how do you value Bitcoin, or old scares about criminal use or ESG concerns, or it's too volatile for my portfolio. But for seven straight years, the number one answer has been a lack of regulatory clarity. If you look at crypto as an asset, it's the best performing asset of all time. It's not correlated with stocks and bonds. It's a great asset for people to add to their portfolios, particularly in relatively low amounts, and really boost your risk adjusted returns. And the reason they haven't is that the government has been somewhere between, you know, hostile and questioning of this market for the last 15 years and particularly for the last four. There's just been a huge amount of regulatory uncertainty surrounding this market.

But what does one do to solve political problems like this one? Well, there's a grand old tradition in America, you buy some politicians. Don Corleone.

I need a man who has powerful friends.

I need a million dollars in cash. I need. Don Corleone. Those politicians that you carry in your pocket like so many nickels and dimes. Of course, in the United States, no one speaks of buying politicians. It's simply exercising one's First Amendment rights by donating to political campaigns. And last year, that happened like crazy. The 2024 election was incredibly contentious and incredibly expensive. There was money pouring in from all different sectors. Traditionally, the biggest players have been big pharma, big tech, big banks, big business. But in this cycle, a new player emerged. Big crypto. The crypto industry spent at least $170 million in support of candidates on both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats for Congress and for the House of Representatives. But we wanted to see what was the point of all this spending. We talked to senators, representatives, crypto industry leaders, and the American people to just See what all of this money in politics is doing. So join us as we investigate the new player in town, the crypto industry.

The reason crypto spends so much money in this political cycle is it faced such extraordinary challenges under the prior administration and the only way it could overcome those challenges was to put extraordinary effort into getting a new regulatory regime in place.

I don't think the level of spending in crypto, you know, towards politics is particularly surprising given how existential of a threat, you know, regulations are to adoption of the space. So I think we'll continue to see a lot of that. And even looking at the past couple of years, the spending's been incredibly successful at, you know, achieving greater alignment with folks on the hill. Citizens United had massive implications for US politics. The Supreme Court essentially said that free speech was equivalent to political spending. So companies, individuals could contribute unlimited amounts of money to support or oppose candidates.

The Supreme Court's ruled that people have the first Amendment right to support the candidate they want.

The crypto industry, like many other industries, set up so called Super PACs or Super Political action committees in order to distribute its donations. The focus was simple. Back candidates who supported crypto, regardless of whether the candidate was a Republican or a Democrat. The crypto industry created ads for these candidates, lots of ads, but they never mentioned crypto once.

The idea that if you're in a specific industry, like if you're a corn farmer, you can only support ads that support corn. My candidate is a champion for just corn. He doesn't do anything else is silly.

There were no anti crypto voters. If a politician said I'm anti crypto, there wasn't a whole group of people that said, okay, I'm voting for you, but if you were pro crypto, there was a group of people voting for you. And I think the Democrats really didn't understand that. They missed that.

Among the top corporate donors in the 2024 elections was Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange. Though other reports showed Coinbase's contributions to be around $50 million, we looked at the FEC receipts ourselves and, and discovered it was actually twice that. A whopping $104.5 million to the Pro crypto super PAC Fairshake and its affiliates. Their backing was crucial in key races like Ohio's Senate election where Bernie Morano defeated crypto skeptic Sherrod Brown with a massive $40 million in support from the crypto super PACs. Ripple also made a major impact, donating $20 million to FairShake and then another 25 million. All this money from Fairshake also helped elect pro crypto leaders on the Democratic side, including Alyssa Slotkin in Michigan, who won with $10 million in crypto industry support. In addition to their election spending, both Ripple and Coinbase contributed to the presidential inauguration. Ripple donated $5 million in XRP tokens, while Coinbase gave $1 million to the Trump Vance inaugural committee. Ondo Finance, another crypto firm, also donated $1 million, although they stayed out of the election itself. Well, I think that Trump is, you know, the first very openly, you know, crypto supported president, and, you know, we want to award that and, you know, signal alignment with, you know, that embrace of the industry. These investments appear to be paying off. The SEC has already dropped the lawsuits it filed against Coinbase and Ripple for selling unregistered securities. But did the crypto industry really play a role in getting Donald Trump reelected?

When you look at the election results and you look at the swing states and you look at the difference between the results, it is believed that Crypto played between 1 and 2% role in the swing states. If that's true, considering the results are within that margin of error, then crypto literally could have helped decide the presidential election. And anyone who denies that is denying facts.

We're here to talk to voters and see if crypto played a role in this election cycle, whether it helped Donald Trump become president again, whether it played an impact in congressional races. Because as we know, the crypto industry has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this election cycle. So we want to see what people think about that. So we're going to go try to find some and join us. Did you vote for Trump because of crypto?

Partially, yes.

Partially. Really? What made you decide? Well, he's the most pro crypto president we've had in America, so that's one of the reasons. Definitely. What were the issues that you were voting on?

I would say definitely crypto legislation was huge.

I think Donald Trump is going to modernize the industry.

I think he's going to take us out of the Stone Age and bring us into the 21st century.

Not all crypto backers claim credit for the victory of Donald Trump. And Trump himself. No paragon of modesty would likely say that he would have won the election on his own merits without a penny from the industry. But immediately after his inauguration, he did issue crypto friendly executive orders. Get the pen.

Get.

So they were just chanting, get the pen. Which is definitely a reference to, you know, Donald Trump signing a bunch of executive orders as soon as he takes office. So he is now officially president. He asked the power to remove all of the executive orders that the Biden administration put in and sign executive orders of own. One of those expected executive orders is going to be a national priority on crypto. So we'll know more information when he actually signs it and releases it. But it seems that everyone here is very excited for a change in the administration's policies. Putting his money where his mouth was, or maybe seeing an opportunity, he and his family members started their own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. And the Trump family issued two meme coins shortly before his inauguration. One named for Trump himself and the other for his wife, Melania. You made a lot of money, sir.

How much?

Several billion dollars, it seems like in.

The last several days.

Several billion.

That's peanuts for these guys. Many of the MAGA faithful were enthusiastic. So you say you don't know much about cryptocurrencies, but if you could just name three cryptocurrencies that you know, okay.

Bitcoin dosh and the Melania.

Did you invest in the Trump meme coin or Melania Meme coins? Actually invested in both, yes, sir. Did you hear about the new Trump and Melania meme coins that just launched? No, not buy one.

Yeah.

More seasoned crypto supporters expressed concern that what might appear to be a cynical money grab would not help the reputation of the industry.

With Donald Trump, you get everything, so you get the things that you don't like. And so if you don't like the Trump meme coin, that's part of the whole package of him being pro crypto. And that's just how he's going to operate for him and his family. So what I don't like about it, frankly, is the pressure that it puts on the older politicians in our society, where they'll look and say 48 hours before he accepted the oath of office for a very sacred position in the United States, he's grifting on the society. And so that will put pressure on regulators and lawmakers to. To potentially slow things down for the crypto industry.

So Trump, always mercurial, always transactional, may follow through on his crypto promises, or he may not. But the signs are certainly positive.

We've went from that era to an era where yesterday, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, issued an executive order creating a crypto council where they're going to explore many things. Stablecoin legislation, they're going to explore the possibility of a digital assets stockpile. The bottom line is, you know, when the president United States. Donald Trump says he's going to make America the crypto capital of the world. We have done a complete 180.

We've kind of transitioned from what I think you have to say was a hostile environment as it relates to the past administration's perspectives on crypto. And, you know, now there's an administration or president who's leaning into crypto, wanting to support innovation and support American companies that are, you know, at the forefront of that.

We had coding in blockchain, much of that entrepreneurial move offshore. We had venture capital firms and blockchain innovators move outside the United States. And none of that is in keeping with America's tradition of being a leader in all things technological, including in financial technology. Here's the difference. Gary Gensler has left office. Affected at noon on January 20, President Trump has nominated Paul Atkins, who's a very experienced SEC lawyer who knows precisely how to balance innovation technology with our security laws and security regulations. And I think President Trump will also nominate someone at the CFTC that shares philosophical view as well.

I think we're likely to see the government not sell the existing Bitcoin that it has, and it already has, you know, 200,000 plus Bitcoin. And I think that will be really significant. I think there's a reasonable chance that the government will add to those holdings.

It may not be apparent in the era of Elon Musk, but Congress does still matter in Washington. And crypto industry donations were decisive in numerous races for the House and the Senate. And the winning recipients have not forgotten that support. In South Carolina, William Timmons won reelection to his congressional seat.

Their support definitely played a substantial role in my victory.

In Ohio, Republican Bernie Morano ran against and defeated a long seated Democratic Senator, Sherrod Brown, who is the chair of the powerful Senate Banking Committee.

The funding from the crypto industry in my particular race was actually decisive because Sherrod Brown was raising money from every scumbag organization in America at record paces. So I needed all the allies I could get and for the crypto industry to invest in my race in a significant way and counter some of the total and complete lies that Sherrod Brown was telling about me was absolutely instrumental. So I think in my particular race, it was a two for one sale because at the end of the day, I don't think the industry wants somebody to do their bidding. They didn't support me because I agree with them. They supported me because they agreed with me. So it was in that they saw somebody where we had common thought processes and got rid of a guy that wasn't so much a crypto skeptic. He was just an idiot. And there's a big difference.

And the fellow who claimed crypto put Donald Trump over the top.

Crypto literally could have helped decide the presidential election. And anyone who denies that is denying facts.

He himself ran for the Senate seat of crypto nemesis Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, and he lost, though he still managed to get 40% of the vote in deep blue Massachusetts.

In my race, I raised $3 million. Senator Warren had 25 million. It's kind of hard to compete, you know, when you have that kind of difference in funding.

But the crypto industry won plenty, and it won big. It had a 91% success rate in getting supported candidates elected or opposed candidates to defeated. Analyzing the election results, the New York Times reported that the effort amounted to one of the most aggressive corporate spending sprees in modern political history. And it appears to have paid off handsomely.

There's no doubt that the efforts of this lobbying group that we back, Fair Shake, along with some other leaders in the crypto space had a big impact. We, you know, it's important to note that we just don't think that crypto should be a bipartisan issue. I mean, this is a consequential technology that is going to be impactful for the world, but especially for the United States. And, you know, the voice of crypto holders and those that are in the industry needs to be heard.

So now comes the governing part, which in a severely polarized Washington is mostly an impossible treat. But crypto now seems to have enough friends in both parties to establish a clear regulatory framework that the industry needs. But when.

So when it comes to passing meaningful crypto legislation, I don't know that we can get it done in the first hundred days, but the goal would certainly be get passed meaningful legislation this year that sets a regulatory framework that hits three criteria. It's fair, it's consistent, and it's transparent.

The way to look at this is that this technology is going to stay it's here. Either we adopt it, regulate it, and make it useful and keep the innovation and the innovative companies and the entrepreneurs in the United States, or we drive them away because our policies are so archaic, so old, and the US Would lose the edge it has. So we shouldn't look at this as a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. We should look at this as a key financial issue to ensure that we keep our leadership, our innovation in the United States, in the blockchain technology and crypto markets.

I think the reality is the Democrat Party has seen that what this issue around crypto is about is about making sure that this technology grows and thrives here in America is that if they put irrational barriers to innovation development in America, it's not going to end that innovation, which they may or may not like. It's just going to go somewhere else. So we want that innovation to grow and thrive here in the United States of America. And I think you have people on the other side, specifically maybe Alyssa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego, that really care about this industry. And of course I don't agree with them on most issues. They're Democrats and I'm a Republican. But we can find common ground on making certain that innovation grows and thrives here in America.

One way to do this is to pass an updated piece of legislation called the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century act, or FIT21.

I think you'll see that the banks and the financial services industry is going to really make a lot of substantial investments and changes following the regulatory framework that we're going to provide. We're going to give them the regulatory certainty to invest and then we're going to create a stable environment for emerging technologies to flourish. So I'm just very excited about the future. I think that it's going to result in people that are not currently in the financial system, they're debanked. It's going to cause them to have some new version of banking, whether it's just giving people access to financial markets they don't have or bringing people into kind of the fold for the future. So I just really think that there's incredible opportunities and I'm looking forward to.

The next few months we enter this 119th Congress. I think you'll see that our committee will still prioritize a dollar backed stablecoin authorization at the federal law level, creating a market structure that provides clarity to innovators, consumers, users about financial services and blockchain and tokenized payments, and the innovation of creating a tokenized company. I believe we'll have an SEC and a CFTC that will work with Congress on designing the right statutory approach for market structure. So I'm optimistic going into this Congress that we'll build on what we got done in the last two years and have a real opportunity to make permanent legal changes around digital assets in the next few months.

And whether it's the SEC or the CFTC that ultimately regulates crypto, industry leaders already see good things happening. We came to D.C. to learn how Crypto helped contribute to the elections of the most pro crypto Congress and the most pro crypto administration. But now that they're elected, what are they going to do? Well, we met up with Chainlink co founder Sergey to ask him about the infrastructure that we could see in America going forward and how it could be based on blockchain technology.

So I think there's now opening up this new category of usage for blockchains that is going to happen at the national level. I've already had some experience in the past year working with various central banks. And so we are in the process of basically not only powering the defi community, which we power the majority of, not only powering the capital markets community, but I'm basically here in D.C. to see how the global open source standards that Chainlink creates can help power entire economies.

Honestly, in the last four years we have most of our customers are outside the United States and we shifted most of our hiring outside the United States. It just felt odd as a US Based company. And now, you know, we, in the last several months we're starting to shift more of those being US based. So, you know, I think it's positive all around the activity and the number of enterprise deals we closed in the last two months, you know, sort of post election was more than we had closed in the prior six to eight months before. So we're already seeing momentum shift.

Crypto's proof of impact over the next few years is going to be so substantial that people, including even Elizabeth Warren, are going to change their tune. At the end of the day, what crypto is going to do, the financial industry, is dramatically reduce costs and dramatically increase efficiency and dramatically increase inclusion. And those actually align well with what Warren and others aim to do. It's worth noting people don't like banks, people don't like financial services, and crypto is the first important innovation in finance and financial services. Over the past 30 years.

I think the regulatory battle in the crypto industry has already largely been won based on the new administration that's coming in. But there's still some final stages of kind of crossing the T's, dotting the I's, finalizing what a good regulatory framework looks like, but now in a very positive environment rather than a negative environment. So it's actually very good that nothing got super finalized in the negative environment and it's going to get finalized in this positive environment.

I know there are a lot of people who find it ironic that this decentralized technology that was all about getting away from the Government needs some level of government relief in order to thrive to the degree it can. But I think that's false binary thinking, right? Governments are powerful forces. If they want to put their foot on you and keep you down, they maybe can't deny you forever. And to be sure, bitcoin grew over the last 15 years. It wasn't stopped. They can't deny you. But to imagine that they can't slow down your industry if they're aggressively hostile is just naive. So all we're trying to do is go from aggressively hostile to neutral. And if we do that, crypto can achieve all the things that we love and that we talk about.

The cryptocurrency industry is looking forward to that and even much more.

I'm basically here in D.C. meeting with regulators, lawmakers, congressional staffers, cabinet members and others to kind of understand how it can be expanded even beyond the financial system to do something called whole of government. I think this is really just the beginning of a whole new user group for the blockchain technology. But it's going to be much less about speculation and it's going to be much more about delivering real value use cases in the financial sector and then outside of the financial sector as well. The question of DC isn't just. It is about consumers and their rights and their protections and how consumers should interact with crypto and tokens and tokenization, renewable asset tokenization. But it's also the place that's responsible for a nation's infrastructure.

Right?

There's security related infrastructure. They are transportation related infrastructure, voting related infrastructure. One good example of infrastructure that could be very applicable is identities for voting, using blockchain technology to verify identity, and kind of have a process to generate a very highly reliable system to prove identity for voting purposes, which I think is a priority for this administration.

Again, it's important also to note crypto doesn't want a wild wild west. It doesn't want no regulation. It actually wants more regulation. Wild Wild west would set back this industry years in the same way that a lack of regulatory clarity set us back for years. So I think it was just advocating for an open dialogue, an open discussion, a willingness to look at a 21st century technology from a 21st century regulatory lens instead of trying to apply laws that were written in the 1930s and 1940s. And I suspect that's what we'll get.

When the election ended last November 5, all campaigning and fundraising, of course, completely ended for about 24 hours. In the United States, it's always election season. The 2026 midterms are rapidly approaching. And here we go again.

One thing that we learned last election cycle was that if you understand crypto and you take a reasonable approach to it, you have some friends that might be willing to support you. But if you're going to be an obstacle to the much needed change, you might have a difficult election coming up. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I mean, that's our system. And, you know, if the crypto community wants to spend money to get Congress to pass legislation to give them the certainty they need, that's their prerogative.

A year from now, we're going to be in full midterm election season because of the 2026 midterms. And the thing that your listeners and everyone should be aware of, if the Senate were to flip back to be in controlled by the Democrats. Do you want to know who the chairperson of the Senate Banking Committee is who oversees the SEC and financial markets in the banks? Senator Elizabeth Warren. She would be the one in charge of the Senate if the Senate flips back two years from now. So I think you're going to see a huge continuation of the crypto influence and crypto vote in the midterms.

While John Deaton might have a 60% grudge against Elizabeth Warren, he successfully defended Ripple as a lawyer taking on the sec. So he's done his part for the cause. And Matt Hogan thinks that maybe this was the election for crypto, that this administration and Congress will deliver everything the industry wants.

My expectation is like we're going from zero to 60 on a regulatory front in the next couple of years. And I think most of us in crypto will be very comfortable at 60 and would rather focus on building the tech and building the business and building the industry than on lobbying in Washington. But maybe I'm being naive and sort of the regulatory concerns will come back.

Nevertheless, just days after the election last November, the leading crypto pack, Fairshake, announced it had already raised more than $78 million to spend on the 2026 midterms. And the politicians are ready to receive it. We ran into Tina Forte in a Washington bar the weekend of the inauguration. Ms. Forte ran for Congress against Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or AOC, two times and lost badly both times. So if you were to run again, would you be interested in, like, taking money from the crypto industry for your campaign? Yes, I would, yes, if it's legal. Although we also spoke to Jeff Criswell and Jared Sesler, both Republicans who lost their races without any support from the crypto industry. You know, this whole thing, there are strings attached. In my view, again, as somebody who's brand new to this, there are strings attached to just about everything. I just want to make sure if we're moving into this world with crypto, that it's done, you know, ethically, like you just said, and that there's a lot of safeguards and people. There's a trust there, which I think there's a. That's the problem right now is it's sort of the wild west. Let me say something about crypto. If a legitimate crypto person wanted to make a donation to my campaign in crypto, I would take it. I mean, zero there, there's zero doubt about that. Again, I'm an anti regulation person, so I think we should just leave it alone and let it operate. They want to get those people elected, but that's no different than any other lobbying work that's ever happened. And so I'm not a big fan of almost all of the rules or regulations around campaign finance currently. And so I would say that I would lean towards not having a lot of rules around it in the future. Would you accept crypto donations? Absolutely, 100%. Our next campaign, which we're already starting on fundraising for, that we absolutely 100% would accept crypto donations. At the start of this story, we asked a simple question. What happens when a new kind of money enters politics? We thought it might be about bitcoin in the White House or Trump embracing crypto, but that was only part of the story. Another part was happening in Congress quietly, strategically, with serious money behind it. What we found is that power doesn't always look like a rally or a red hat. More often it looks like a super pac, a digital wallet, a quiet meeting, a contribution made in the right district at the right time. Power wasn't taken, it was given. And for the first time, crypto wasn't fighting the system, it was funding it. So now the question isn't just what crypto wants from Washington, it's what Washington now owes in return. Because if the future of money is being written today, crypto isn't just part of the conversation, it's helping hold the pen.