Crypto PAC's $5.5 million Congress pick gets Maryland win, more crypto allies advance

The leading crypto political action committee, Fairshake, often backs its favored hopefuls for the U.S. House of Representatives with ad campaigns in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it devoted Senate-level money — some $5.5 million — to Adrian Boafo, a Democrat who just won his party's nomination for a Maryland seat on Tuesday.

The state delegate's dominant victory records another success for the industry's super PAC and its affiliates after having notched a big primary election win with its $12 million devoted to Barry Moore's Alabama Senate bid last week.

Boafo's campaign website says he's looking to "provide responsible regulatory clarity for innovators building the next generation of financial tools," though it also included consumer-protection language often associated with crypto-resistance Democrats. Still, he has a record of pro-crypto legislative efforts in his state and favorably completed advocacy group Stand With Crypto's political questionnaire to earn that group's "A" rating.

The industry's support didn't go unnoticed. The open seat drew a massive number of Democratic candidates to replace outgoing Rep. Steny Hoyer, and Maryland's U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen bashed the "obscene amount of big special-interest money" Boafo received in the race.

In the same state, Fairshake backed incumbent Representative April McClain Delaney for $516,000, while also contributing ad spending in other states' Tuesday primaries to Republican incumbent Representative Blake Moore in Utah and $1.3 million for one of the industry's most reliable allies in the House, Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat. All of them also won their races or were winning, with McClain Delaney in an early lead with votes still being counted.

The most recent Federal Election Commission filings showed Fairshake with about $126 million still on-hand at the end of last month. But it's spending heavily on the way to the November general elections in which the two-year destiny of the U.S. Congress will be decided.

If Boafo contributes to the rise of a new Democratic majority in the House, the crypto industry will have a campaign-finance bond with him and other Democrats the PAC has supported. A Democratic majority is set at 79% odds in betting on prediction market platform Kalshi, and if the party earns that status, it'll have chairmanships of all the committees, complete with control of the chamber's agenda and subpoena power.

Fairshake's approach is to flood pro-crypto candidates from both parties with large-scale independent advertising that can't legally be coordinated with the campaigns. The ads don't typically mention crypto as a political issues but are instead just calculated to use whatever political message would be most helpful for the candidates.

Think Big PAC, an AI-focused group that shares many of the same funders as Fairshake and is represented by former Fairshake frontman Josh Vlasto, was more direct, attacking New York congressional candidate Alex Bores as being tied to former FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried.