Ripple executives are rejecting the read that Democrats' midterm sweep amounts to a defeat for digital assets, arguing that industry-friendly candidates won on both sides of the ballot and that the push for federal rules will outlast any one election cycle.
In a post on X on Wednesday, CEO Brad Garlinghouse wrote that "pro-crypto members won on both sides of the aisle" and that the roughly 67 million Americans who use crypto "aren't going anywhere." He closed with a line aimed at the incoming legislature: "New Congress, with the same mission: clear rules, built in America."
The message landed the morning after Democrats secured both the House and Senate, a result that many in the industry had feared would stall a regulatory framework that was already behind schedule.
Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty, whose post Garlinghouse was responding to, conceded that some coverage would frame the result as a setback but said the picture is more complicated. He cited victories by pro-crypto candidates in both parties and pointed to the record of the Fairshake super PAC in the primaries and the general election. Early data from Stand With Crypto, he said, showed a substantial number of industry-aligned lawmakers elected across party lines.
"Clear rules for digital assets were never a one-cycle project," Alderoty wrote, describing the pro-crypto coalition as the product of years of work by "grassroots advocates to industry organizations."
The group's running tally as of November 4 counted 222 House winners it rated pro-crypto against 106 rated anti-crypto, along with 19 pro-crypto and eight anti-crypto Senate winners. Stand With Crypto said the figures were unofficial until certified.
Note: Figures are the group's own ratings and were described as unofficial pending certification.
Fairshake, whose major backers include Coinbase, Ripple and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, won 53 of the 58 primary and special-election races it backed, according to press reports. One tally cited by Reuters put its record at 29 wins in 34 races it spent on, with several contests still uncalled.
The overall scorecard is less flattering. The costliest loss came in Ohio, where Democrat Sherrod Brown, a crypto skeptic, won his Senate race decisively even after industry political action committees poured more than $60 million into efforts to defeat him.
Legislatively, the path looks harder. The Clarity Act, the sector's main market-structure bill, has not cleared the Senate; it failed on a 49-50 vote in September. Senator Cynthia Lummis, a lead sponsor, has warned that this Congress was the last realistic opening for comprehensive digital asset legislation and has said a failure could push the matter to 2030. With Democrats holding both chambers when the new Congress is seated in January 2027, that timeline now looks more plausible unless lawmakers revive the bill before the current session ends.
Not everyone in the industry is bracing for the worst. Zach Pandl, head of research at Grayscale, told CoinDesk that the drive toward clearer regulation and institutional adoption of digital assets rests on foundations deeper than the work of the last Congress.
For XRP holders, the reaction was split. Some pointed to the incoming committee leadership -- Representative Maxine Waters at House Financial Services and Senator Elizabeth Warren at Senate Banking -- and to the long-running jurisdictional friction between the SEC and the CFTC, questioning how the industry could claim a win. Others argued the community should not count on Democrats.
Garlinghouse's position has been consistent through Ripple's own litigation with regulators and the wider industry's battles in Washington: the size of the American crypto-using public makes the sector a constituency neither party can write off. The election changes who controls the gavels, but not, in Ripple's telling, the destination.
Whether that argument holds will be tested quickly. The lame-duck session offers the last near-term chance to move the Clarity Act, and the industry's spending machine, which posted a mixed record this cycle, will face a Congress whose committee leadership has been openly hostile to the sector.
