How Crypto Played the Political Game—and Won 'Bigly' - Ep. 734
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Battle that was in front of us was a political one, and the only way we were gonna take the politics out of crypto was to build the largest political operation any industry has ever built and respond with to with to the politics with politics.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of the Cryptopians. I started covering crypto 9 years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes, was the 1st mainstream reporter to cover cryptocurrency full time. This is the November 12th, 20 24 episode of Unchained. Overwhelmed managing crypto investments? Meet I yield a free financial planning tool for crypto natives with automatic defy yields tracking. Unlike portfolio trackers, iYield provides a complete financial view of assets, debts, income, and expenses in crypto and fiat. D
Laura. Thanks for having us on. Thanks
so much, Laura. Great to be here.
We have had a historic election for crypto. Crypto created the largest single issue pack, Fair Shake, and its strategy appears to have been a resounding success and that it resulted in the vast majority of all of its candidates that are all the candidates that supported winning their races. So what are your broad takeaways from crypto's involvement in this election? Well,
I think, for me at least, the my biggest takeaway is is a vindication of what Brian Armstrong said at our very first meeting about 4 years ago when I first started having conversations about coming over to Coinbase. His focus was very much on what we could do to activate the crypto community. And he was talking about Coinbase customers and the tens of millions that were, you know, customers of Coinbase and what we could do to activate them. And it took a couple years, but, ultimately, we sort of executed on his vision to bring those people into the process. And it just shows how formidable it
I would add. I think that what it demonstrates to me is that nothing happens overnight that we build. We've been building now for Coinbase for a decade in trying to get good policy across the finish line. And sometimes it takes years to start to build the foundation, and then it can happen really fast. And I think the major major factor here was, in fact, the, you know, the nearly 2,000,000 Americans now who have raised their hand, the 52,000,000 Americans who own crypto. Those are really important numbers, and I think the voting block is what I think really punched through the noise this year
I Laura, if I could just add one more thing? I was looking back to a blog post that we put out at Coinbase in March of last year, and we we very proudly announced that we had 25,000 people signed up for something we had called at the time, crypto 435. We thought that was quite a number, 25,000. And now as Kara was saying, we're approaching 2,000,000, who have signed up with the Standward Crypto Organization. The trajectory has been extraordinary. It all starts with sort of simple beginnings, but it was a vindication of the time and effort we put into kind of launching our own grassroots effort
Yeah. If there's anything I've learned in my time covering crypto, it's that, things can take off very quickly. So I wanna dig into the details. So the super pack, which is Fair Shake, has so far received $204,000,000 in donations. And then as we've discussed, there's also a Stand With Crypto, which is a regular pack and has another $2,000,000. So for the purposes of discussion, can you briefly explain to the listeners the difference between a pack and a super pack, but then also what the difference was in
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