Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss said they’re spending $21 million to continue the crypto policy momentum led by Republican lawmakers, countering a wider industry effort that’s carefully supporting politicians from both major parties.
The U.S. congressional midterm elections are approaching next year, and they promise an intense political clash that could leave President Donald Trump without the Republican control of Congress that’s helped him push crypto policy past the finish line. The brothers are giving to the Digital Freedom Fund political action committee to support GOP candidates, they said on Wednesday.
The contribution made in bitcoin
“will identify and support champions of President Trump’s crypto agenda in primary races and the midterm elections,” Tyler Winklevoss said in a post on social media site X. If Democrats prevail in the midterms, as opposition parties often do in the middle of a presidential term, Winklevoss said they’ll get in the way of the Trump agenda.
“We know from their past behavior that they will resort to whatever bad faith tactics and tricks they can think of (e.g., bogus impeachments, lawfare, etc.) to try to derail the President,” he wrote.
The brothers who run the Gemini crypto exchange and have become a fixture at White House crypto events and have been publicly praised by Trump, but their endorsement of Republicans runs afoul of the industry’s wider insistence that crypto policy is bipartisan and that politicians from both parties should be supported as long as they favor the sector.
In last year’s consequential congressional elections, the crypto industry erected an unprecedented tower of campaign cash in the Fairshake PAC and its affiliates, outspending other industries and even rivaling the big party-led PACs. The binge of campaign spending resulted in dozens of political victories that helped pad the industry’s level of support in the current Congress, which has moved rapidly to support digital assets initiatives — most notably the recently passed Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.
Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican who now chairs the Senate Banking Committee, thanked the industry for unseating former Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who previously ran the committee, on Tuesday at SALT Wyoming.
Fairshake, which has already amassed $141 million for the next congressional elections after a recent $25 million bump from Coinbase, has split its allegiances deliberately between the parties. The industry has long pushed the talking point that its aims are nonpartisan, and Fairshake’s affiliates sought to underline that position by supporting both Democrat and Republican candidates who are willing to champion crypto bills.
The super PAC favored by the Winklevoss brothers was formed last month, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and hasn’t yet disclosed its donor activity. It’s set up to spend money independently, meaning the campaigns it weighs into can’t have any direct involvement with the PAC’s spending decisions. That super PAC structure also lets it spend unlimited amounts, such as the tens of millions the industry expended in places like Ohio and California last year.
The Winklevosses are pursuing U.S. crypto market structure oversight that “avoids the pitfalls of overregulation, bloated licensing regimes, and increased red tape that only serves to choke off innovation, grow the Regulatory Industrial Complex, and empower the swamp,” Tyler wrote.
This marks a second recent development in which the men behind Gemini are going their own way from the bulk of their industry. Tyler Winklevoss stood up as a major critic of President Trump’s nominee to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brian Quintenz. All of the leading crypto lobbying groups sent a letter to Trump on Wednesday in vigorous support of Quintenz, who used to be a policy executive at a16z.
