Mayor Steve Fulop of Jersey City, New Jersey, was running for governor when he announced that he would invest part of his city’s pension fund in bitcoin.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., was toying with a challenge to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul when he co-sponsored a resolution calling blockchain technology “the future of innovation.”

Between them, the two represented an emerging trend among ambitious Democrats: Candidates angling for state office are touting support for the cryptocurrency industry.

For crypto, the trend could yield rewards. Industry players would like to see friendly state-level financial regulation, loose rules for energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining, and potentially even state pension fund investments in their products.

One industry critic chalked up the trend of Democrats paying homage to crypto to the industry’s money cannon.

“I think it boils down to two words: opportunism and fear,” said Mark Hays, who works for the groups advocacy groups Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress. “I don’t think it gets more nuanced than that.”

For politicians, the push for crypto could draw votes from the young men mostly likely to trade crypto, but there could be bigger rewards to be reaped by attracting deep-pocketed industry donors. Supporters of crypto threw around large sums of money in last year’s elections for national offices and won nearly across the board.

“The crypto industry, because the industry can print its own money, somewhat literally and metaphorically, it is able to pull a lot of money into electoral races and lobbying activity,” Hays said. “Right now, a lot of folks are worried about being on the wrong side of that money.”

The move, though, could also invite backlash from Democratic primary voters at a time when the Dogecoin brand has been coopted by Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn government office and President Donald Trump has launched a meme coin of his own.

Becoming Power Players

Cryptocurrency companies have taken an improbable journey over the past decade from Silicon Valley startups to Washington power players.

They first flexed their might in 2022, when Sam Bankman-Fried and other executives at the fraudulent crypto platform FTX showered tens of millions of dollars on Democratic and Republican campaigns.

Bankman-Fried was behind bars by 2024, but other industry figures banded together on a super PAC that spent nearly $200 million on congressional races.

The group was officially bipartisan and spent........

© The Intercept