From a billionaire’s perspective, a US Senate seat can be tantalizingly cheap. In 2022, Peter Thiel bought one for his former employee JD Vance with $15 million in independent campaign expenditures—a pittance for an oligarch whose net worth has increased by about $12 million per day since then.

This year, a handful of cryptocurrency billionaires may be on the verge of helping to secure a US Senate seat in Alabama for even less.

In a state as red as Alabama, whoever wins the Republican primary is almost certain to cruise through the general election. The primary is on Tuesday, but if no candidate wins a majority, there will be a runoff next month. For awhile, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall topped the polls. Then, in January, Donald Trump endorsed GOP Congressman Barry Moore for the gig. Within weeks, Defend American Jobs, a crypto-funded super PAC, opened its checkbook, shelling out more than $5 million in February for ads boosting Trump’s pick. Moore overtook Marshall in the polls and has been leading ever since.

Crypto titans’ decision to get involved in the Alabama Senate race is emblematic of their ongoing efforts to secure favorable treatment in Congress through unprecedented spending. Beyond helping to install another friendly senator, the ads Defend American Jobs has bankrolled serve as a warning to anyone running for Congress that crossing crypto companies means risking millions of dollars being spent against them.

As Rick Claypool, the research director at the watchdog group Public Citizen, wrote about crypto spending in the 2024 election cycle, no industry had ever before “so wholeheartedly embraced raising as much directly from corporations and openly using that political war chest as a looming threat (or reward) to discipline lawmakers toward adopting an industry’s preferred policies.”

Defend American Jobs, which supports pro-crypto Republicans, is almost entirely funded by another crypto super PAC, called Fairshake. Meanwhile, a similar super PAC called Protect Progress—which is also funded by Fairshake—bankrolls crypto-friendly Democrats. Combined, Fairshake and its partisan affiliates spent more than $130 million on congressional elections in 2024. In Ohio alone, Defend American Jobs spent more than $40 million to help Bernie Moreno, a wealthy Republican car dealer, defeat then-Sen. Sherrod Brown, a longtime Democratic incumbent and champion of organized labor.

Almost all of Fairshake’s funding comes from just three sources: the crypto companies Ripple and Coinbase and the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is heavily invested in crypto firms. Each have contributed roughly $90 to $100 million to Fairshake since the 2024 election........

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