# Stand With Crypto **Stand With Crypto** is the membership-and-messaging layer of the crypto industry's political project — a 501(c)(4) advocacy group launched by [[Coinbase]] in August 2023, funded by Coinbase alongside Kraken, Gemini, Anchorage Digital and Paradigm, that organizes crypto holders into a voting bloc, grades politicians on crypto policy, and supplies the "grassroots" beneath the industry's super-PAC spending. By January 2026 it claimed **2.6 million U.S. members**, 675,000 of them added in 2025, with chapters in all fifty states. Ten folders link here because the organization sits where the vault's crypto, midterms and campaign-finance threads meet. ## The model The group is the [[NRA Political Machine]]'s method applied to a financial product, and the vault's [[Turning Point USA Ecosystem]] and [[AI Political Spending Ecosystem]] pages use it as the comparison. Its instruments are a **scorecard** rating every member of Congress on crypto votes and statements, a candidate questionnaire for federal and state races (the 2026 version launched in January), letter-writing and call campaigns timed to legislation, and endorsements — 32 House candidates, mostly incumbents from both parties, announced August 24, 2026. The grievances it organizes around are the ones the [[Debanking]] and [[Operation Choke Point 2.0]] pages document: the claim that regulators used supervisory pressure to cut crypto firms off from banking, reframed as a civil-liberties injury to ordinary account-holders. ## Division of labor Stand With Crypto does not itself spend on elections. That is the job of [[Fairshake PAC]] and its affiliates, tracked on [[Crypto Super PACs]] — the 2024 cycle's largest single-industry super PAC operation, funded by Coinbase, Ripple and Andreessen Horowitz, and reloaded with more than $140M for 2026 ([[a16z 2026 Midterm Donation Aggregate]]). SWC supplies the constituency that makes the spending look like representation: the "millions of crypto voters" cited in every Fairshake press release are its membership rolls. The [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]] records the legislative results — the stablecoin and market-structure bills of 2025–26 — that the two arms were built to produce; the [[Trump Crypto Ventures Personal Extraction]] page records what the administration took in return. ## Why the vault cares The organization is the [[Crypto-Political Machine]]'s answer to a question the vault asks of every industry bloc: how does concentrated money acquire the appearance of a mass movement? Here the answer is a free app, a scorecard, and a claim of membership that no one audits — and it worked well enough that by 2026 both parties' candidates were filling out the questionnaire. [[Brian Armstrong]] and [[Cameron Winklevoss]] are the founders' pages; the [[Sam Bankman-Fried Collapse Timeline]] and [[FTX Collapse]] are the disaster the industry's political turn was built to outrun. ## See Also - [[Coinbase]] · [[Brian Armstrong]] · [[Fairshake PAC]] · [[Crypto Super PACs]] · [[Crypto-Political Machine]] · [[Crypto-Political Machine News Log]] - [[Debanking]] · [[Operation Choke Point 2.0]] · [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]] · [[Cryptocurrency Ecosystem]] - [[NRA Political Machine]] · [[AI Political Spending Ecosystem]] · [[a16z 2026 Midterm Donation Aggregate]] · [[Trump Crypto Ventures Personal Extraction]]