Back in 2024, Fairshake, a crypto super PAC with gobs of money, spent almost $2 million on Pat Ryan's re-election campaign. That's no small sum. He was the seventh-highest crypto PAC recipient in the country for the House or Senate. It dwarfed other outside spending on his behalf, such as $177,000 from With Honor Fund II (a veterans group supported by Jeff Bezos) and $171,000 from NY Common Ground (a short-lived Democratic super PAC). Hell, it was a fourth as much as the $8 million that the Ryan campaign spent for itself. Among his direct donors were crypto all-stars: Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States (second to Binance globally); Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, presumed to be the world's second largest holders of Bitcoins; and Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's largest venture capital firms, which manages billions in crypto. All ponied up $3,300 for Ryan's reelection soon after he voted for a major crypto bill earlier in 2024. Pay Ryan may not have boasted in his district, but for a time he was a crypto darling.

What did this $2 million buy? Plenty of TV ads I never saw. But the one I found on YouTube is instructive. No mention of crypto, of course. Rather, rock muzak with shots of Pat Ryan talking with cops, posing young and beardless in his Army uniforms, walking down a country lane with his wife and two young children. The gruff male voice-over tells us: "Pat Ryan is restoring order at our southern border … In Congress Pat Ryan demanded funding for thousands of new border patrol agents … Insisted on real solutions for our broken immigration system … Pat Ryan restoring order, keeping New York safe." In short, a political hack even Fox News viewers can trust.

In Congress, Ryan didn't hesitate to return the favor. In his first term he'd already voted for an important crypto bill known as FIT21, which passed but didn't become law. Ryan was hardly the only Democrat to support it, but the majority of his Democratic colleagues have consistently opposed crypto-sponsored legislation. The industry has argued – not without reason – that it’s subject to patchwork regulations. Plus, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) has followed a pick-and-choose strategy in going after crypto crimes, which can seem arbitrary. Wouldn't it be better to establish a specific regulatory system for crypto in which the rules are explicitly stated rather than left up to court decisions? Maybe. But maybe not in the way crypto would write the legislation. Crypto would like to move much of its activity from under the oversight of the SEC to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Now it just so happens that the SEC has a staff of 4,000 while the CFTC has 560. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler didn't like FIT21 one bit. He said it would "create new regulatory gaps and undermine decades of precedent." Pat Ryan voted for it anyway.

In the new Congress now under President Trump, Ryan voted for crypto's two big dream bills, the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act (a new version of FIT21), in July 2025. Dozens of Democrats joined him, but many held out. The GENIUS Act was signed into law by Trump the next day. It creates a regulatory system for stablecoins, a particular type of crypto token that is pegged to the dollar, unlike others that fluctuate wildly. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others feared that the GENIUS Act didn't provide enough safeguards against fraud, money laundering, or a nightmare scenario of a stablecoin run, a panic that could cause huge losses. (This happened to a stablecoin in 2022.) Now that we have this law, Amazon and Walmart may issue their own stablecoins as a way to eliminate credit card fees. (You'll pay Amazon in Amazon currency rather than with Visa or Mastercard.) But the most famous stablecoin to date may be the USD1 issued by the Trump family's crypto business, World Liberty Financial. An Abu Dhabi investment firm bought $2 billion worth of these stablecoins. All told, more than $4.7 billion have been sold. Not all of this goes into the Trump family coffers, but Abu Dhabi has certainly found a way to please our president.

If the GENIUS Act focused on stablecoins, the CLARITY Act took up everything else, especially the transfer of authority from the SEC to the CFTC. Last week, more than a year after the House passed it, the Senate Democrats united to say "No" to the CLARITY Act, joined by four Republicans. Even our own U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a crypto enthusiast who worked with a Republican senator since 2022 to craft a bipartisan bill, turned against the CLARITY Act in the end. (Gillibrand is a crypto parent: as a 22-year-old Stanford grad, her son co-founded a crypto exchange valued at $300 million.)

The cause for concern isn't hard to find: Donald Trump and his clan have made $2.3 billion from crypto scams since he returned to office, one of the great feats of corruption in American history. Would the CLARITY Act crack down on Trump? Not likely. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, the firebrand from Connecticut, has been as blunt as can be. About the GENIUS Act for stablecoins, he said, "This bill says, as a member of Congress it is unethical for me to issue a stablecoin. The bill says it is okay for the President of the United States." When he spoke on the Senate floor before the CLARITY Act vote Murphy pointed out that Trump made $6 million per day last year, much of it from crypto. While the Trump family's $trump meme coin has earned them $616 million, a million purchasers have lost $3.2 billion as its value collapsed. We may need legislation to combat money laundering and other crypto sins, but the CLARITY Act had too much Trump Protection Act in it. The bill was "sadly and tragically riddled with loopholes that enable him to continue this same self-dealing and self enrichment," Murphy said. An amendment added for ethics reform was "a sham, a charade."

To be fair, Pat Ryan has condemned corruption, sort of. A month before his pro-crypto votes he gathered with half a dozen colleges to promote an "End Corruption Now" package of bills to ban Congressional stock trading, bar former Congress members from becoming lobbyists, and other good measures. At a press conference in front of the Capitol building, he said that in his third year in office he was disappointed "to see far too many colleagues in the building behind me of both parties and certainly pretty much everybody at the White House down the road doing the exact opposite, putting themselves first ahead of county and ahead of constituents It's absolutely unacceptable, it's un-American." Please note how in classic Pat Ryan fashion he invokes bipartisanship as an ideal as if blind to the stark differences between lockstep Trump Republicans and his own disputatious Democrats. Also note his reluctance to criticize the Orange One by name. He left it to Joe Neguse from Colorado to call out the "shameless cryptocurrency scams" as part of "Donald Trump's first 100 days back in office … marked by chaos, corruption, and self-dealing." Neguse didn't hesitate to vote against the crypto bills Ryan supported.

Earlier this year, Ryan rejected the two biggest donors to his 2024 campaign: AIPAC and Palantir. AIPAC, like Fairshake, has spent vast sums promoting/attacking Democratic candidates without mentioning what it really stands for it in its ads, namely, supporting the far right Israeli government through the genocide in Gaza and the deadly vigilantism in the West Bank. In Israel, Palantir has equipped the Israel Defense Forces with the data surveillance and AI to conduct this slaughter. At home, Palantir has equipped ICE to conduct its raids. Did Ryan feel a change of heart or read the polls? No matter. He did the right thing. Let's hope he has second thoughts about his dalliance with crypto.