Crypto lobbyists are reportedly battling for the state of Ohio as major super PACS attempt to establish influence over Congress ahead of the election.
A network of crypto super PACS have spent $38 million in Ohio trying to get Republican Bernie Moren a seat in the U.S. Senate, Washington Post reports.
Moren is competing against Sherrod Brown, who is designated as “strongly anti-crypto” by the Coinbase-backed advocacy group Stand With Crypto. Brown voted against the reversing of SAB 121, and has claimed that Hamas is being fueled by cryptocurrency.
Speaking to crypto supporters in Austin, Moreno said,
“Today, in the United States Senate, you don’t have people who know how to use email and we’re asking them to regulate digital currencies…
You need to have people who have a basic understanding, otherwise they’re driven by special interest groups that will tell them, ‘I need you to vote this way or that way.’”
A spokeswoman for Moren said that he has a “deep understanding” of crypto technology, unlike Sherrod Brown, who she says “doesn’t know the difference between blockchain and a chain saw.”
Rolling Stone recently reported crypto political groups are planning on spending $32 million between August 22nd and the end of September to boost Moren’s campaign.
Money is flowing into the race from a group called Defend American Jobs, a group Rolling Stone reports is “effectively a subsidiary” of Fairshake, a crypto-focused political action committee (PAC) funded by Coinbase, Ripple and Andreessen Horowitz.
Brown has also made a slew of public comments critical of the digital asset sector. In late 2022, the senator said the crypto market was a “complicated, unregulated pot of money.”
“I’ve spent much of the last eight years and a half in this job as chair of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, educating my colleagues and trying to educate the public about crypto and the dangers that it presents to our security as a nation and the consumers that get hoodwinked by them.”