The Crypto Money in Our Primary Comes From Trump's Tech Allies

August 20, 2026

In the past week, a super PAC called Protect Progress has reported spending $94,763.80 on glossy mail supporting Jake Auchincloss in our Democratic primary.¹ I have written an open letter asking his campaign to renounce that spending and sign a People’s Pledge.

This post is about a different question, one worth answering before September 1: whose money is this?

One Network, Three Names

Protect Progress does not exist on its own. It is the Democratic-facing affiliate of Fairshake, the cryptocurrency industry’s super PAC network, which also operates a Republican-facing affiliate called Defend American Jobs.² The network was formed in 2023 and almost immediately became one of the largest outside spenders in American politics. In the 2024 cycle it spent $133 million, a total surpassed only by the super PAC operations of Elon Musk and Charles Koch.³

The funders are not a mystery, because super PACs must disclose them. As of late 2024, Coinbase had given the network $86 million, Ripple $45 million, and the founders of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz $44 million.² Reuters reported this morning that Fairshake began this year with a $193 million war chest, still has about $130 million left to spend on the midterms, and remains “financed almost entirely” by the same three names: Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz.⁴

The Funders’ Other Investment

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, gave more than $5 million to pro-Trump political groups in 2024 alongside $33.5 million to the crypto industry’s political operation, and told Joe Rogan’s audience that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exists to “terrorize financial institutions.”⁵ This cycle, according to federal records analyzed by Reuters, Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz have each donated about $4 million of their personal funds, most of it to MAGA Inc., President Trump’s own super PAC, while their firm has put more than $81 million into crypto and AI political committees, including at least $23.8 million into Fairshake.⁴

The investment has paid off. ProPublica reported in November that under the Trump administration the CFPB has been hollowed out: virtually all of its investigations have halted, including three separate probes into companies backed by Andreessen Horowitz, and a proposed rule that would have required crypto firms to compensate defrauded customers was withdrawn in May 2025.⁵ One settlement was renegotiated so that a company’s penalty fell from $2 million to $45,000.⁵

Coinbase and Ripple got their own deliverables. In February 2025, the Trump administration’s SEC agreed to dismiss its enforcement lawsuit against Coinbase, with no fine and no change to the company’s business model.⁶ The SEC then announced it would abandon its appeal in its long-running case against Ripple, and the two sides jointly dismissed all remaining appeals in August 2025, ending the government’s five-year effort to apply securities law to the XRP token.⁷ And the alliance is not conducted only through filings: yesterday, August 19, Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong was at the White House shaking President Trump’s hand as the president delivered remarks alongside cryptocurrency executives.⁴

Meanwhile the network’s Republican arm does exactly what its name suggests. In March 2025, Sludge reported that Defend American Jobs was spending millions of dollars in Florida special elections for one stated strategic reason: the House Republican majority stood at five seats, and the crypto industry wanted those seats held.⁸ The same network whose Democratic-facing arm is mailing our district spends its money, through the other arm, to preserve the congressional majority that protects this administration.

Not Loyalty. Leverage.

The network’s innovation, as Reuters put it, was refusing to align with one party: it backs candidates of either party who support its regulatory agenda and spends to end the careers of those who do not.⁴ Public Citizen called Fairshake a corporate “Death Star” that could “annihilate individual candidates.”⁴ In 2024 the network’s Republican arm spent $40.1 million to help unseat Senator Sherrod Brown, then the chair of the Senate Banking Committee and the industry’s most persistent critic in Congress.²

The industry is equally willing to turn its fire on Democrats inside a Democratic primary. Last week the Miami Herald reported that Protect Progress, the same committee spending for Auchincloss here, has spent more than $1 million attacking Miami-Dade Commissioner Oliver Gilbert in Florida’s 24th District primary, using advertisements dressed up with fabricated Miami Herald headlines the paper never wrote.⁹ The Herald put the committee’s total spending this cycle at more than $22 million, most of it in support of Democratic candidates the industry has decided it can work with.⁹ Gilbert’s description of what was happening to him should be read in Massachusetts too: “crypto con artists trying to buy a Democratic primary.”⁹

Reuters reports that corporations have spent an unprecedented $517 million on the 2026 House and Senate races in just fifteen months, with crypto, tech, and online gambling accounting for at least $294 million of it, displacing the traditional corporate power centers of Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, and oil.⁴ This is the new machinery of American campaign finance, and our primary is one of its test markets.

What This Means in the Fourth District

The super PAC mailing our district is funded by Coinbase, whose federal lawsuit this administration dismissed and whose chief executive shook the president’s hand at the White House yesterday. It is funded by Ripple, whose five-year SEC case this administration wound down. It is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, whose co-founders are among the largest personal donors to Trump’s own super PAC and whose portfolio companies saw federal consumer-protection investigations quietly frozen. And the network these funders built spends millions, through its other arm, to keep the House in Republican hands.

That is the money that has decided it has a preference in a Democratic primary in Massachusetts, and its preference is Jake Auchincloss.

As I have documented before, Auchincloss has taken more than $77,500 from crypto-industry sources, joined the “Blockchain Eight” letter pressuring the SEC, and voted for the CLARITY Act, FIT21, and the rollback of DeFi reporting rules, a record laid out in detail here, with the most recent installment being $10,500 in maximum checks from Solana Labs’ CEO and COO months after his CLARITY Act vote. And as the Boston Globe reported this week, his campaign posted public red-box instructions telling outside groups what likely primary voters “need to see in their mailboxes,” language the Protect Progress mail then tracked nearly word for word.¹⁰

The through-line is not complicated: the industry that is allied with this administration, that funds its super PAC, that benefits from its regulatory retreat, and that pays to protect its House majority, is spending money to choose the Democratic nominee in the Fourth District. A Democratic primary is supposed to be where Democratic voters decide, without interference, who will carry their values in November.

Congressman Auchincloss should publicly renounce Protect Progress’s expenditures, call on the committee by name to cease all activity in this primary, and sign a People’s Pledge with me before early voting begins on August 22. If the crypto industry’s money is as unwelcome in his campaign as it should be in our primary, saying so costs him nothing but the mailers.

---

References