Three weeks after Donald Trump’s reelection victory sent cryptocurrencies on a bull run, Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., spotted an opportunity.
Collins started buying thousands of dollars’ worth of a meme coin called Ski Mask Dog. His legally mandated disclosure of those purchases helped drive the coin’s price up more than 100 percent.
The purchases once again raised the question of whether members of Congress should trade assets that might fall under their oversight. It also highlighted just how rare it is for members of Congress to buy or sell crypto — despite the growing, bipartisan enthusiasm for unleashing it on Americans.
Only four members of Congress, including Collins, reported buying or selling cryptocurrencies over the past two years, according to a review of trading information compiled by data provider 2iQ. All four were members of the House: two Democrats and two Republicans.
The lack of trading activity suggests that the ranks of lawmakers holding crypto has not changed much since December 2021, when a Wall Street Journal review found that only 11 members of Congress were invested in it.
Members of Congress and industry observers pointed to a range of factors that could explain the reticence, from skittish financial advisers to conflict-of-interest concerns. One crypto skeptic, meanwhile, said he thought the lack of trading activity might simply be a case of “do as I say, not as I do.”
“If those numbers are accurate, and only a few members of Congress own it, it reflects where most Americans are,” said Mark Hays, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform. “Most Americans don’t see a lot of utility and are worried about how speculative and risky crypto looks.”
Opinions on the Hill itself vary wildly for why members of Congress hold so little cryptocurrency — and whether they should. One enthusiastic senator told The Intercept that Congress was just too old to get what crypto was all about, and a more skeptical one said she was glad so few members created conflicts of interest by owning securities they are tasked with regulating.
“Crypto Capital”
The dearth of crypto trading on Capitol Hill is especially stark because the last Congress adopted crypto as one of its pet causes, and the new Congress seems even more eager to push crypto into the mainstream.
In May 2024, the House overwhelmingly passed the industry’s favorite piece of legislation. The bipartisan bill, called the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, would transfer oversight of many digital assets from the Securities and Exchange Commission to a more lightly staffed regulator seen as friendlier to the industry, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The Senate never took the bill up, but the November election made clear that crypto would have many champions in both chambers of Congress.
Ahead of the ballot, crypto-allied super PACs amassed a $200 million war chest and spent with abandon to prop up candidates from both parties willing to toe the industry line. The results were very good for crypto, which pulled off a complete sweep in contested Senate elections and racked up a winning record in House races.
“Our Founding Fathers would have been bitcoiners,” said Republican Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who unseated the incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown. “They believed in decentralization of power and control. That’s what this is.”
Moreno said he held bitcoin but sold it all before the election.
Then there was the man at the top of the ticket — Donald Trump — who has promised to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Trump is backing a crypto platform of his own, for which he is assuming no liability but where his family could take 75 percent of revenues from the cryptocurrency sold on the platform.
Photo: Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Crypto Congress
The hyperbolic statements of support from many elected officials about crypto contrast sharply with what they actually hold in their portfolios.
Back in 2021, a Wall Street Journal review found that only two out of 100 senators and nine out of 435 House representatives held crypto.
In the Congress that just ended, only four members bought or sold crypto, despite an industrywide rebound in the wake of the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fraud.
Besides Collins, the other crypto traders in the last Congress were Reps. Barry Moore, R-Ala.; Shri Thanedar, D-Mich.; and Jeff Jackson, D-N.C.
During the same time period, 151 members of Congress reported making more than 21,000 trades overall of assets that included bonds, stocks, and mutual funds.
Two crypto enthusiasts in the Senate gave different answers for why so few of their colleagues are getting in on the action.
“I joke that the median age in the Senate is about 107.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he thought it might be a lack of familiarity with crypto in general.
“I joke that the median age in the Senate is about 107,” Cruz told The Intercept.
The ignorance, Cruz said, could pose a problem for would-be backers of regulations: “It’s one of the dangerous things, when Congress tries to regulate crypto, is there are so few members that have any familiarity with it, that there’s an enormous danger of wreaking havoc and unintended consequences, which is one of the reasons I have been the leading advocate of a light touch from government on crypto to give it space to grow.”
That line of argument is grating for crypto skeptics like Hays.
“We have argued that, for the most part, the industry already has a regulatory framework that it needs to follow, because even though it offers products via new technological platforms, these products aren’t that different from existing securities,” Hays said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., thought the lack of crypto investors on the Hill might be due to how such purchases would be perceived.
“We’re already beat up over owning stocks, so why add another asset that you’re just going to get beat up over?”
“I don’t think they want to buy the brain damage of criticism,” she said in an interview. “We’re already beat up over owning stocks, so why add another asset that you’re just going to get beat up over? I think that’s part of it.”
Lummis is one of the most bombastically enthusiastic members of Congress when it comes to bitcoin, and has said that she owned five bitcoins before putting her holdings into a blind trust.
Since Trump’s election, bitcoin has soared from a price of about $60,000 over the summer to around $100,000 this week. Asked whether she still holds any of the cryptocurrency, Lummis said, “I hope it’s still there, obviously.”
The “Let’s Go Brandon” Debacle
One of the thinning number of elected officials to call for strict crypto regulation is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who said she was grateful that few members dabble themselves.
“I think it’s a terrible conflict of interest to own individual investments where Congress has important oversight,” she told The Intercept. “It’s just a plain old conflict of interest.”
If lawmakers needed an object lesson in how quickly crypto trading can create conflict-of-interest allegations, the saga of Madison Cawthorn and the “Let’s Go Brandon” coin provided one.
Cawthorn, who represented North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District for a single scandal-stained House term, bought 180 billion of the anti-Joe Biden meme coins in December 2021 at prices below market value. He then went on to promote the coin and sell it, all the while failing to follow disclosure rules. The House Ethics Committee ultimately fined Cawthorn $14,000.
During the meme coin’s monthlong life, Let’s Go Brandon — named for a right-wing slogan code for “Fuck Joe Biden” — soared to a $570 million market capitalization on claims that it would sponsor a NASCAR driver before plummeting to $0 on news that it would not. Litigation over the coin lives on.
“Memecoins have literally no usefulness beyond their buzz, their lulz.”
According to Garrick Hileman, an independent analyst who previously served as the head of research at Blockchain.com, such rapid changes of fortune are not uncommon for meme coins.
“What people typically mean when they discuss a meme coin is something that doesn’t even actually pretend to offer anything other than entertainment,” Hileman said. “Something may be funny, something that captures a moment. It’s not even pretending to solve something like the high costs of cross-border payments.”
Hileman said some digital assets seem to have found their footing for certain uses, such as Bitcoin as an alternative to gold.
“Meme coins, on the other hand, have literally no usefulness beyond their buzz, their lulz, whatever narrative is propping it up,” Hileman said. “And if that narrative or attention shifts, then you see the price collapse.”
Skiing to Profit?
None of that appears to have dissuaded Collins, the representative from Georgia, from buying up Ski Mask Dog. A classic meme coin, Ski Mask Dog promotes itself with pictures of dogs, in ski masks, and calls itself a bulwark against “manipulation by powerful entities.”
After news of Collins’s first buy became public, the coin more than doubled in value to gain over $100 million in market capitalization, a shift that cryptocurrency outlets attributed to his purchase.
Collins did not return a request for comment, but he’s previously given a curt explanation for buying Ski Mask Dog.
“I liked the coins, so I bought them,” Collins told the outlet Decrypt. “Washington and Wall Street have stigmatized emerging technology in the crypto ecosystem for far too long, and it’s about time that we start treating this industry with the respect it deserves.”
The enthusiasm for meme coins divides Collins from many in the crypto community. Investor and financial adviser Ric Edelman, the founder of the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals, said that there was a “level of skepticism” about meme coins from the rest of the industry.
“The vast majority of them are more speculative in nature, don’t have a legitimate business use case behind them and often are involved in scams and manipulative trading activities,” he said. “So it’s not merely that members of Congress shouldn’t be doing this; I don’t think the vast majority of Americans should be doing this.”
Edelman said he would support forcing members of Congress to put all of their holdings — crypto or otherwise — in a blind trust so they would not be able to personally manage their investments.
During the last session of Congress, then-Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., sponsored legislation that would have mandated the blind trusts. Dozens of bipartisan co-sponsors signed on, but the bill never got a vote.
Hileman, the crypto researcher, said he was wary of members of Congress buying meme coins, though he called the issue “more intellectually complicated” than straightforward bribery.
“My knee-jerk reaction is, of course they shouldn’t be doing this,” Hileman said. “It just seems like the signaling value of a sitting member of Congress is quite powerful, and the potential for abuse is significant.”
