Quiet ties: how crypto lobbyists gained entry to the White House

After the FTX collapse, many American crypto projects lost faith in the Democratic Party and redirected money and effort into lobbying their interests around Donald Trump. The market appears to be entering a new era, as many swap earlier ideals for cooperation with the state within the traditional economy.

Oleg Cash Coin has unpicked the tangled links between big crypto projects and officials in the new presidential administration—and what their leaders are after.

The PayPal diaspora

One of the most influential crypto lobbyists in America is PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel—venture capitalist by trade and technocrat by temperament. 

His firm, Founders Fund, began aggressively buying bitcoin in 2014 and exited all its positions before the 2022 market crash, booking about $1.8bn in profit. According to Reuters, the fund returned to crypto in the second half of 2023, investing $200m ahead of BTC-ETF approval. 

Thanks to Thiel’s patronage, his old acquaintance and partner at the businessman’s Mithril Capital fund, J.D. Vance, ended up as U.S. vice-president. When Vance decided to run for the Senate in 2022, Thiel donated $15m to his campaign.

The vice-president also raised $93m to set up his own venture firm, Narya Capital. He was helped not only by Thiel but also by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) co-founder Marc Andreessen. 

a16z was one of the main sponsors of Fairshake—a crypto-oriented political committee that in 2024 allocated about $140m to support candidates running for Congress. Hence the appointment of a16z crypto’s policy director Brian Quintenz as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) hardly comes as a surprise.

All of the above are closely tied to Elon Musk. In 2022 a16z, alongside Binance and Sequoia, became among the biggest investors in the Twitter buyout. In 2024 the same firms, except Binance, began “helping” Trump pick candidates for key posts in the administration. The New York Times lists the following people close to Thiel and Musk who influence the White House:

• Marc Andreessen — founder of a16z; 
• Jared Birchall — head of Musk’s family office, adviser to the Dogecoin Foundation; 
• Sean Maguire — partner at Sequoia Capital; 
• Trey Stevens — co-founder of Anduril; 
• Shyam Sankar — chief technology officer at Palantir; 
• David Marcus — CEO of Lightspark, former head of Meta’s blockchain unit.

Musk now heads a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) created specifically for him, and the designation of “crypto czar” went to David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer. 

That list would seem enough to gauge how deeply crypto-linked business has penetrated the presidential administration, but there is another notable player.

The market for connections

Tether stands apart in this context: it ranks among the 20 largest buyers of U.S. government debt. Cantor Fitzgerald, led by Howard Lutnick—the current commerce secretary—acts as the operator purchasing and holding Treasuries for the USDT issuer. According to the Wall Street Journal, the bank owns 5% of Tether’s shares.

Delve into Tether’s history and among its founders you will find billionaire Brock Pierce. He was also a director of the Bitcoin Foundation, the founder of EOS, and one of his companies featured in the Mt.Gox case. 

Pierce is one handshake away from Trump. They are linked by Steve Bannon, a senior adviser to the president in his first term. 

In 2001 Pierce founded Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), a pioneer in services selling currency for MMORPGs. In 2006 Bannon became IGE’s chief executive. 

In 2018 he said that in 2016 Pierce’s work on Trump’s presidential campaign kept them from focusing on joint ventures in crypto.  

In 2019 EOS bought, for $30m, a domain owned by MicroStrategy (now Strategy) to launch the social network Voice. Investors in the project included Thiel, Chinese mining giant Bitmain and Galaxy Digital’s chief executive, Mike Novogratz. 

A year later MicroStrategy chief Michael Saylor announced the first public bitcoin purchase worth $250m. More than 40% of the company’s shares, as of March 2021, were held by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard Group and Citadel. That suggests financiers had already approved Saylor’s plan.

Perhaps the “last” to the market of “mutually beneficial” crypto ties was the camp comprising Coinbase, Grayscale and Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group (DCG, Grayscale’s parent). Silbert stood at the origins of Ripple, Coinbase, CoinDesk and other projects. 

DCG’s relationships reached beyond Republicans to Democrats. Larry Summers, a key adviser on the company’s board, served as U.S. Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and headed the National Economic Council under Barack Obama. 

The political calculus shifted after FTX collapsed in 2022. The Democrats lost influence in the market, and for many their role in crypto came to be embodied by Gary Gensler—now the former head of the SEC—who was reminded of his personal ties to Sam Bankman-Fried’s family. 

Many accepted the market’s new rules, which now favour state regulation focused on domestic crypto businesses and dollar-backed stablecoins. Even the neutral Coinbase joined in, allocating $25m to Fairshake for the 2026 midterms, while Ripple donated $5m to Trump’s inauguration. 

Meanwhile, Saylor openly urges the destruction of gold as an asset class. In his view, the savings of “America’s enemies” kept in banks would be debased, and Washington would control “the global reserve-capital network”.

It seems that instead of advancing the principles of decentralised systems, we have ended up with yet another financial institution managing capital and liquidity flows. Even on social networks, the old anti-state-monopoly spirit of the crypto market is ever harder to find.