crypto industry donors are putting a lot of real money on the 2024 election.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. The crypto industry has been

the

the crypto industry has been fairly quiet recently with the scandals around the bankruptcy

of crypto exchange FTX and its former chief executive Sam Bankman-man Freed fading from the headlines.

But behind the scenes, the industry has become a bit of a power player in the 2024 election.

Funding political ads, endorsing candidates running in House and Senate races, and raising

millions in funds, according to a recent report from the nonprofit group Public Citizen.

It's a trend Brady Dale has been keeping an eye on. He's a

reporter for Axios who writes their crypto newsletter. The crypto industry has

decided to make this the year that as a group they really invest heavily in making their power

clear to political leaders so they can get the kind of laws they want.

You know they've already been active in a few primaries. They've had several wins there, most notably, I think they were able to keep Katie Porter from getting through the primary in California, which was a big goal. There's been a few other successes like that.

A little more confusing to other ones because some other factors have been in play.

But yeah, they just really want to see legislation happen in the next Congress and they're flexing their financial muscle right now in

order to convince legislators to come to the table with them you know next year.

Yeah tell me more about that financial flex. What does that look like?

Public Citizen estimates that there's like a hundred and nineteen million dollars of

corporate money that's come into this overall election, you know, that's all elections together, not just, well, they're not really in the

presidential very much, but all the elections together. It actually might be like a little bit more than that. It sort of depends on how you define different kinds of categories, but it's a lot of money, you know, one organization in particular, which is kind of leading the charge, this pack or group of packs really called Fair Shake has 169 million dollars of

assets available and you know by some estimates that's something like altogether

that's something like roughly half of all of the money

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