1. Why is the Fairshake super PAC spending $63 million in Ohio?
The Fairshake super PAC and its allied crypto groups have put $63 million into Ohio's Senate race, which ends with voting on November 3, aiming to keep former Senator Sherrod Brown out of office. Hermine Wong, a lecturer at Berkeley Law, argues in an opinion column published on November 2 that the spending does not follow any consistent measure of who has helped or hurt the industry, and that crypto voters should ask who decides.
The scale of the race is unusual. According to the advertising tracker AdImpact, Ohio is one of only three non-presidential contests ever to pass $500 million in advertising, and the second this cycle after Texas. Of the crypto money, Fairshake's network accounts for $56 million. The remaining $7 million comes from the Digital Freedom Fund, a political action committee linked to the Winklevoss twins.
A Fairshake spokesperson describes the group as issue-focused and says it supports pro-crypto candidates in both parties. Wong's column tests that description against the group's own choices.
2. What is Brown's record on crypto?
Brown lost his Senate seat in 2024, which means he has cast no vote for or against crypto legislation during the 119th Congress. Even so, Fairshake announced its largest funding commitment of the cycle to block his return, and it did so days after Senate Democrats blocked the Clarity Act, a market-structure bill. Brown took no part in that vote.
After his 2024 defeat, a Fairshake spokesman credited the group's efforts with Brown leaving the Senate, describing him as one of the industry's top opponents. Wong acknowledges that Brown chaired the Senate Banking Committee during the early industry push for legislation. As chair, he could have scheduled a committee vote on FIT21, a bill that had already passed the House, and he did not.
Wong says that record is fair game for criticism. Her question is narrower: whether inaction in 2024, followed by an absence from Congress ever since, justifies the largest congressional spending of the 2026 cycle.
3. Did Republicans, not Democrats, fail to deliver the Clarity Act?
If spending tracked the legislative record, Wong writes, the targets would be easy to name. After the 2024 elections, industry figures celebrated what they described as a pro-crypto Congress. Republicans have held the House, the Senate and the White House for two years, and the industry expected a market-structure bill that would reduce its dependence on the shifting priorities of the leaders of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Clarity Act failed to clear cloture, the procedural vote needed to end debate.
Republicans respond that the bill needed 60 votes and could not pass on their numbers alone. Wong agrees that this is true, then points out that other contested bills also needed Democratic support and still became law. She names the Laken Riley Act, the HALT Fentanyl Act and the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Different bills assemble different coalitions, she argues, and the majority controls the calendar, the agenda and committee assignments.
From that she draws a conclusion about merit. A merit-based operation would target the Republicans who failed to deliver. Instead, in her telling, the largest check goes to punish a Democrat who was not in the room for the vote.
4. What does the Stand with Crypto scorecard show?
When asked to explain such discrepancies, Fairshake points to the Stand with Crypto scorecard, an advocacy project launched by Coinbase. Wong takes the answer at face value and asks whether the group's funding follows it. If so, she says, Fairshake should be pursuing other politicians who received failing marks as well.
The scorecard lists 29 sitting senators with F grades in 2026. Four of them are up for re-election: Chris Coons of Delaware, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. All four voted against cloture on the Clarity Act, and Fairshake has spent nothing against any of them.
Brown is one of 11 candidates in an 'other political figure' category who carry F grades. Fairshake has spent nothing in general-election races against the other ten. Its next-largest general-election race is in Nebraska, where it has spent $13.5 million against the independent Dan Osborn. Osborn holds a B grade, based on a single 2024 statement praising crypto's role in innovation and jobs.
The pattern, Wong writes, is that an F does not guarantee an attack and a B does not prevent one. That leaves the question of who decides where the money goes.
5. Who gets to define what is pro-crypto?
Fairshake is not a grassroots movement, Wong notes. In 2024, three companies, Coinbase, a16z and Ripple, supplied more than 80% of its money. She argues that the Brown and Osborn decisions cannot be explained by grades alone, and that the group uses the pro-crypto label to justify choices it makes in private.
The scorecard is also opaque, in her view. It has no public methodology and, she says, no consistent standard. As an example she asks why Senator Mark Kelly earns a D grade even though he voted to overturn SAB 121, the accounting guidance that had discouraged banks from holding crypto for customers, and voted for the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law.
Wong contrasts this with other political scorecards. The League of Conservation Voters has published one since 1970, with a public methodology and named committee decision-makers. The ACLU's scorecard states whether a member voted in line with its stated positions. Such scorecards, she says, measure alignment with an organization's declared positions rather than some abstract label.
She ties the point to a core principle of the industry: do not trust, verify. In her argument, Fairshake and Stand with Crypto ask the community for trust without offering a way to verify.
6. Is big crypto filling a gap that Democrats left?
Wong places part of the responsibility on Democrats. In her account, the party has never built a crypto policy of its own. Under the Biden administration the posture was mainly enforcement, accompanied by rhetoric equating crypto with terrorism. Under President Donald Trump it has centered on ethics criticism. Neither approach, she writes, addresses peer-to-peer crypto innovation.
That vacuum lets Fairshake and Stand with Crypto present themselves as the voice of the whole community. Wong asks who authorized three large intermediaries to define what pro-crypto means, and why those decisions are made privately for a technology valued for its transparency.
7. Background: how super PACs and scorecards shape elections
A super PAC is a political committee that can raise and spend unlimited sums to support or oppose candidates, provided it does not coordinate directly with their campaigns. That structure allows a small number of large donors to account for most of a group's funding, which is the pattern Wong describes at Fairshake, where three companies supplied more than 80% of the money in 2024.
Scorecards serve a different purpose. They condense a lawmaker's votes and statements into a letter grade that donors, voters and the press can read quickly. Their influence depends on how much trust readers place in the method behind the grade, which is why Wong focuses on whether the method is published.
Cloture, the procedure that stalled the Clarity Act, requires 60 senators to agree to end debate on most legislation. That threshold is why bipartisan support matters for any market-structure bill, and why both parties share responsibility for its fate in the Senate.
8. Why the Ohio race matters beyond one seat
Wong frames the Ohio contest as a signal more than a single outcome. The amount spent, the clarity with which the industry has announced its aim and the timing, coming days after the Clarity Act stalled, make the race a message to every lawmaker who sits on a crypto-relevant committee.
The column also raises a question about accountability inside the industry. If a handful of companies steer the money and define the labels, ordinary holders and builders have little say over whom the political effort supports. Wong's case is that the community most affected by crypto policy should be able to examine how those choices are made.
Readers weighing the column should keep its genre in mind. It is an argument, not a ledger of proven motives, and Fairshake's stated position is that it backs pro-crypto candidates of either party. The figures Wong cites are the part that can be checked against campaign filings and the published scorecard, while her reading of what they imply is her own judgment.
Whether voters in Ohio respond to the advertising is a separate matter from the question Wong poses. Her argument stands or falls on the pattern of spending she describes, including the nothing spent against the four F-graded senators facing re-election and the $13.5 million directed at a B-graded candidate in Nebraska.
9. What is the message to politicians, and what comes next?
Big crypto is a business, Wong writes, and its money pays for the advertising and for the scorecard. The message to politicians is that the industry will not try to persuade them. It will make their next election expensive if they cross it. Brown is the 2026 target, and other politicians are the intended audience.
She adds that the strategy works only if the money turns into votes. Her warning to readers is that loyalty to crypto should not be confused with loyalty to the companies financing its politics. Those companies still need the community's votes, and big crypto cannot cast one itself.
The immediate test arrives on November 3, when Ohio voters decide the Senate race. The column is an opinion piece, and its views are the author's alone.