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  7. Midterms expose crypto PAC impotence; Dems plan Trump probes

TL;DR: Crypto PACs including Fairshake spent $154.5 million in the 2026 midterms, yet many of their targets still won, including Sherrod Brown in Ohio. The results could give Democrats, who are poised to take control of Congress, greater momentum to pursue a broader crypto market structure bill that includes ethics provisions targeting Trump’s crypto ventures. At the same time, incoming committee leaders are signaling plans for investigations, with Justin Sun’s legal fight with World Liberty Financial potentially offering lawmakers a useful witness.

Key Takeaways:

Crypto campaign millions couldn’t buy results in the United States midterms, while newly empowered Democrats are looking at both new legislation and overdue investigations into Trump crypto profiteering in 2027.

Pour one out for the would-be Ozymandiases of the crypto campaign finance world, who somehow fared even worse than the Republican party as Tuesday’s midterm election votes were tallied.

Crypto political action committees (PACs) had vowed to strike down upon Democrats with great vengeance and furious anger in the midterms, but ended up spending a fortune to achieve precious little. The PACs’ electoral impotence was exceeded only by Elon Musk, who spent close to half-a-billion dollars promoting Republican candidates, to little avail.

Brian Armstrong, CEO of the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) digital asset exchange that provides much of the Fairshake PAC’s financing, has yet to comment publicly on the election results. That’s a far cry from his triumphant mood on the day after the 2024 election, when he warned Washington’s political classes that “being anti-crypto is a good way to end your career.”

A similar self-imposed gag order has apparently befallen Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, co-founders of the Gemini (NASDAQ: GEMI) exchange-turned-prediction market, who poured millions into supporting GOP candidates and opposing Dems via their own Digital Freedom Fund PAC.

Like Armstrong, Tyler Winklevoss was anything but shy in his post-2024 commentary, most vividly illustrated by his scathing celebration of the resignation of a crypto-skeptical SEC commissioner: “This is what happens when you fuck with the crypto army. You end your political career.” And now? Crypto crickets.

Armstrong’s 2024 flexing included his claim that “crypto supporting Bernie Moreno was the key factor in his victory over Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Sherrod was one of the most anti-crypto senators out there.” And yet, Brown is headed back to the Senate after defeating GOP incumbent Jon Husted and tearing a Titanic-sized hole in the myth of crypto PAC invincibility.

Fairshake and its affiliated PACs poured $154.5 million into the 2026 election cycle, of which $56.6 million went toward defeating Brown/electing Husted. Counting millions more from the Winklevii and other crypto interests, Brown stared down over $64 million in crypto campaign cash and still emerged the winner.

Similarly futile spending was visible across the map, with many pro-crypto Republicans going down to defeat. These included Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), chairman of the House Financial Services digital assets subcommittee, who failed to hold his seat despite receiving nearly $2 million in crypto support.

Fairshake has been furiously spinning the number of candidates it backed that managed to win their races as evidence that the rout wasn’t all that bad. But the PAC has a habit of doling out smaller sums in races in which the outcome is a foregone conclusion. This is a simple quid pro quo for pols who play ball, and while it pads Fairshake’s stats, it in no way moves the electoral needle.

It was left to Coinbase’s VP of U.S. policy Kara Calvert to publicly acknowledge the company’s dismal returns in a tweet thread that attempted to reframe the argument thusly: “The election wasn’t a referendum on crypto.” Calvert clearly wants to let bygones be bygones, claiming that “crypto is 100% bipartisan” while insisting that “our playbook doesn’t need to be thrown out as some are suggesting.”

Perhaps, but we expect the juvenile ‘look upon my works and despair’ attitude will—or at least should—be abandoned for the foreseeable future. Ditto with shameless efforts by the crypto sector to make anyone believe that the ‘crypto voter’ is any more real than the Loch Ness monster, sasquatch or chupacabra. For the record, none of those showed up at the polls either.

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Dem Clarity?

Before the vote on election day, TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg projected that if the Dems regained control of both legislative chambers and Brown returned to the Senate, the result would be a “souring” of the political crypto climate, to the point that TD Cowen would “not expect the [Senate’s digital asset market structure bill] CLARITY Act to pass over the next two years.”

The CLARITY Act went down to defeat in September after the two parties failed to achieve consensus on a number of sticking points, including the GOP’s unwillingness to rein in President Trump’s extremely profitable crypto ventures, which earned him well over $1 billion in 2025 alone. Faint hopes remained that the bill might get a second shot at passage in the post-midterms lame duck session, but those big tall wishes look even less likely now.

And yet, Crypto in America journo Eleanor Terrett tweeted the day after the election that House Dems “are discussing plans to expand the Crypto Investor and Consumer Bill of Rights, [Rep. Maxine Waters’] amendment to the Clarity Act in 2025, into a broader crypto ‘market structure’ bill next Congress.”

Terrett’s sources said the Waters bill would incorporate an amendment she proposed that was ultimately rejected for inclusion in the House version of CLARITY that passed in July 2025. The new bill would also add some Dem proposals that the Senate GOP rejected before CLARITY was voted down, including the ‘ethics’ provisions related to Trump’s controversial crypto activities.

In a more ominous note that has a serious boomerang quality to it, the Washington Sun’s Senate reporter Igor Bobic tweeted a quote from Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), a Dem point person in CLARITY negotiations, who said crypto operators “better go talk to Sherrod Brown first” before making another push for crypto legislation. In a word, ouch.

The GOP-controlled Congress showed little interest in even acknowledging the scale of Trump’s crypto ventures, but the times, they are a-changing. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), who’s set to take over as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in January, had a two-word message post-election: “LAWYER UP.” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) was even more economical with his post-election messaging, tweeting simply “Subpoenas.”

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Enter the Justin

Garcia’s team has already set a goal of putting “an end to the rampant and out-of-control corruption overflowing the Trump swamp.” They may already have an unlikely ally who could provide potentially damning testimony in the form of Justin Sun, founder of the TRON network and an early financial supporter of the Trump-linked token-issuing platform World Liberty Financial (WLF)

Sun has since had a major falling out with the Trump family, leading to him filing a lawsuit against WLF in April after it froze his tens of millions of dollars’ worth of WLF’s ‘governance’ token WLFI. WLF countered that Sun had engaged in “prohibited transactions,” including trying to short-sell WLFI. WLF countersued Sun for defamation, a move Sun called “a meritless PR stunt.”

On November 3 (election day, for what it’s worth), Sun tweeted a lengthy notice on how his lawyers had “moved to sanction [WLF] for failing to disclose, until months into my litigation against the company, that it is a citizen of the UAE.”

In a legal filing dated November 2, Sun’s attorneys allege that WLF originally claimed “only one entity in its entire membership chain,” and that entity was Florida-based. Months later, WLF updated its filing to cite 22 members in the chain, some based in Delaware, others in Puerto Rico and the United Arab Emirates.

Sun’s attorneys claim the change came “just days after World Liberty had learned that the Court was not inclined to grant its request to move this entire case into confidential arbitration.” Sun claims this change was intended to remove his suit from federal court jurisdiction and into a more amenable venue that might compel Sun to submit to arbitration.

Sun quotes from WLF’s ‘gold paper,’ specifically the section declaring the company to be “an American, tax-paying, corporation” that “is not organized offshore.” As Sun acidly notes: “World Liberty was proudly American đŸ‡ș🇾 when it was selling tokens. It discovered its UAE 🇩đŸ‡Ș roots only when it needed a way out of an American federal courtroom.”

Earlier this year, it emerged that WLF had sold 49% of its operations to a UAE government official for $500 million in January 2025, just days before Trump took the oath of office for the second time. More recently, the same UAE sheikh was exposed as 49% owner of World Liberty Trust Company, the WLF-backed would-be national trust bank that in August received conditional approval from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).

Whatever the merits of Sun’s suit, the fact remains that his early purchases of WLFI rescued the entire WLF project from being viewed as something of a joke. Sun was subsequently named a WLF adviser and in May 2025 appeared alongside Eric Trump at a TOKEN2049 fireside chat in Dubai to sing crypto’s praises together.

In other words, it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that Sun may know where a lot of Trump crypto bodies are buried (figuratively speaking). And with the Dems about to assume control of Congress and President Trump’s previously vice-grip hold on the GOP seemingly weakening, Sun might discover that he now has more friends in Congress than he previously imagined. As they say, elections have consequences.

FAQs:

How much did crypto PACs spend in the 2026 midterms?
Fairshake and its affiliated PACs put $154.5 million into the cycle, including $56.6 million aimed at defeating Sherrod Brown.

Did crypto spending help Republicans win?
Largely no. Brown won his Ohio race despite over $64 million in crypto money against him, and several pro-crypto Republicans lost, including Rep. Bryan Steil.

What happens to the CLARITY Act now?
It failed in September, and a lame-duck revival looks even less likely. House Democrats are discussing a broader market structure bill that expands Maxine Waters’ Crypto Investor and Consumer Bill of Rights and adds Trump-related ethics provisions.

Why does Justin Sun matter to possible investigations?
Justin Sun was an early WLFI backer who later fell out with the Trump family and is now suing World Liberty Financial. Given his insider knowledge of the project, he could offer testimony to Democratic-led oversight committees.

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Steven Stradbrooke

Steven Stradbrooke is a ‘self-taught’ writer who learned his craft from every book, newspaper, magazine, newsletter, snarky blog post and bathroom wall poem he ever read. Formerly the senior writer for 11 years at the CalvinAyre.com gambling industry news site, Steven wrote his first Bitcoin-focused article in 2011 and began contributing to CoinGeek in 2017. He joined CoinGeek full-time in 2021.

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