Molly White on Crypto's Rising Influence in Politics

The 2024 election cycle is undoubtedly the most important and active that crypto as an industry has ever seen.

With many Americans in crypto becoming self-admitted single-issue voters, this election season is also becoming one of the most tense.

Case in point: The high-profile crypto founder Ryan Selkis stepped down from his post as CEO of Messari after tweeting that it would be “literal war” with people voting against President Trump, and that they could “die in a “f—ing fire.” A roundup of some of Selkis’ other tweets posted by Molly White, notable crypto skeptic, researcher, and founder of “Web3 Is Going Just Great,” quickly went viral. Then, things turned somewhat personal.

“There’s a hate in you, Molly. A hate from a feminism that’s lied to you and made you empty,” Selkis tweeted, flinging words back at the crypto critic he was careful to note he also respected.

In a new interview, Coinage caught up with White to discuss the ensuing back-and-forth with Selkis and her new project “Follow the Crypto,” which seeks to track the crypto industry’s growing influence on elections via some of this cycle’s largest Super PACs.

For starters, how did White react to being dragged into a crypto titan’s own ousting?

“It was pretty spectacular to watch,” she tells Coinage. “I think his politics align with Donald Trump a lot more than just on crypto … but I saw the tweets that he was making and I was like, wow, those are really extreme.” White shared that she and Selkis had shared messages privately and attempted to encourage him to take some time to step back and reflect on things.

Selkis later responded to Coinage via email, saying, "I've always been polite and sincere with Molly, but she — as a typical cultural marxist — is insincere and vicious. Someone who's never built anything, and simply destroys, but never rebuilds. There's a role for critics, and I think Molly is a good one. I've said as much for years to her publicly and privately."

Nonetheless, the episode does shed light on exactly how some in the industry are feeling. On more than one occasion, Coinage has reported on outright lies coming from the Securities and Exchange Commission and blatant misrepresentation of facts from Chair Gary Gensler. That anger is palpable and for single-issue crypto voters, the stakes of this election season could not be higher. Considering even basic access to banking services for companies in the industry to operate now hangs in the balance, election results could very well be life or death for some crypto startups. 

Perhaps then, it’s not surprising to see crypto finally take a stand. This year, crypto has mounted America’s largest war chests among active super PACs, or political action committees, in Fairshake. The super PAC has raised more than $200 million in total for the 2023-2024 period, surpassing even the ​​President Trump-aligned Make America Great Again PAC.

In digging into Fairshake, which has garnered contributions from crypto powerhouses Coinbase, a16z, and Ripple among others, White uncovered some interesting patterns. Similar to Coinbase’s Stand with Crypto PAC, the majority of funds were coming from industry players and executives with very little contributions coming from supposed real-world crypto users.

“I was really quite shocked by the amount of spending that's been happening there,” White said about Fairshake, which had garnered a solid number of contributions around $1 million or more. “That's really incredible from an industry that's not that big compared to a lot of other industries that lobby very hard in politics.”

In realizing how messy tracking the Federal Elections Commission filings was going to be, the former Harvard research fellow built her own tracking tool. 

“I didn't feel like it was easy to really follow where the money was coming from, where it was going, who they were spending to support or oppose and so I figured, all right, I'll do it myself,” she said. 

Over the weekend, she also tweeted out that the site of Coinbase’s advocacy arm Stand with Crypto somewhat murkily conflated so-called advocates next to the amount of money raised – which was really mostly (99%) just industry donations to Fairshake. 

“They claim to have 1.3 million crypto advocates or something like that and when you actually look at the numbers, they don't really add up and it's because they are claiming on their homepage to have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, when in fact they're actually counting contributions to Fairshake, which is a completely separate PAC,” she said. “It's really far from ‘grassroots.’”

For its part, Stand with Crypto responded, noting that the $1.48M referenced in the disclosure tooltip they added “are donations to the Stand With Crypto 501(c)(4), which was formed last year and has been receiving donations via our donation flow and NFT Mint action.” But the overwhelming fact does seem to be that for all the supposed crypto owners and users in America, there isn’t much to be had so far for advocacy outside of a few founders, VCs, and checks from existing stalwarts. (Coinage may very well be one of the largest grassroots advocacy players with our tool that helps Americans contact their representatives about crypto.)

Disclosures from President Trump’s much celebrated onchain donation portal reportedly attracted $3.3 million in crypto from mid-May through the end of June. According to campaign filings, only 0.3% came from everyday users who weren’t crypto executives or founders. The rest mostly came from Gemini co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss ($2.02 million in Bitcoin,) Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell ($845,000 worth of Ethereum) and Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty (who donated $300,000 worth of XRP.) The list also included Messari CEO Ryan Selkis, who donated $50,000 worth of USDC. 

“I think the takeaway here is that a lot of this political influence that's coming out of crypto is really coming out of the crypto industry,” White said. “And so it worries me to see people who are, you know, ideologically interested in crypto in ways that I really respect – they're interested in the privacy side of things, the freedom end of things – really jumping on board with people who are really just looking to protect their own interests.”

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Update: Article reflects added comment from Ryan Selkis.