❓ Is Stand With Crypto Being Honest With Voters?
❓ Is Stand With Crypto Being Honest With Voters?
🤫 A source inside the organization describes its grading process 👀.
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Hey! I’m Veronica Irwin, Unchained’s regulatory reporter.
As some of you may know, I was hired full-time as Unchained’s regulatory reporter at the beginning of this month. While I’ve spent the past five years covering tech, and am an avid consumer of political news in my personal life, it was challenging to get up to speed on the politics of crypto as fast as I needed to. One of the resources that was recommended to me as a useful cheat-sheet of where politicians stood on regulating the industry was Stand With Crypto, and I found myself referencing its website frequently.
But as I built connections with lobbyists, regulators, policy writers, and other political types, I started to question the reliability of the organization’s scorecard. The scorecard is supposed to be something of a crypto-politics Sparknotes, and tallies up politician’s statements on crypto, along with assigning each a letter grade summarizing where they stand. Some of the grades just didn’t jibe with what I was hearing.
The incongruencies made me want to do some digging—and unfortunately, I’m a lot less confident in using the scorecard now than I was a few weeks ago…
Stand With Crypto Is Grading Politicians on a Scorecard. But How Is It Determined?
The opinions of donors and other “key stakeholders” play a significant role in deciding how politicians are graded.
In late September, when the Stand With Crypto Alliance, a Coinbase-founded crypto advocacy group, gave Vice President Kamala Harris’s stance on crypto a “B” rating, many in the industry were enraged.
The group gives politicians and candidates a grade, with A meaning the person “strongly supports crypto” and F meaning they are “strongly against crypto.” Critics thought Harris hadn’t earned a B for a short statement she gave at a fundraising event about encouraging digital assets while protecting consumers.
“I’ve mentioned this to the team directly, and I still think they are very candid in their operations, but it’s incredibly damaging to appear to be weighing these decisions in smoke filled rooms,” Scott Johnsson, general partner at venture capital firm Van Buren Capital, posted on X. “Unfortunately the close connection with @coinbase lends itself to conspiracy theories (another thing that I’ve mentioned to them).”
Ostensibly in response to the criticism, Coinbase-founded Stand With Crypto demoted Kamala Harris’ grading to an N/A. Stand With Crypto Executive Director Logan Dobson subsequently explained that his organization was making it more difficult for politicians to receive a grade in a now-deleted post on X. The scorecard aimed to “amplify and boost more statements candidates made about crypto in order to showcase the rising power and influence of the crypto voter,” Dobson said in the post. “We are ultimately accountable to the entire crypto community.”
Read More: Kamala Harris Makes Her First Comments on Crypto, and the Reaction Is Mixed
A Scorecard? Or ‘Case by Case’?
The notions of a “scorecard” and letter grades imply a standardized, fair system of assessment, similar to what the traditional school system uses. Additionally, Dobson’s statement that Stand With Crypto is accountable to the entirety of crypto implies no one voter has more say than another.
But one source in the organization who plays a key role in deciding grades described deliberations that vary case by case. Individuals who have a direct line to Executive Director Logan Dobson weigh in, the source said. This could give donors and other powerful politicos outsized sway.
According to the source, Dobson alone is “accountable for every score.”
Stand With Crypto’s communications advisor Sabrina Siddiqui emailed with Unchained for several weeks, and had a phone-call discussion with this reporter about the possibility of a formal interview with Dobson. She seemed surprised when asked why Dobson’s X post responding to the Harris controversy was deleted, and did not explain why it had been deleted when directly asked. She also did not respond to multiple queries about the reporting below.
Read More: How Congressional Committee Leadership Could Shake Out for Crypto This Election
How Stand With Crypto’s ‘Scoring’ Works
There is a “general rubric” that Stand With Crypto follows for its scorecard, the source told Unchained.
If a politician issues a formal statement, for example, that is considered more important than “mentioning something off hand.” Tweets are considered less valuable than a candidate issuing a policy paper. Votes are more important than statements (or, the source implied, tweets and policy papers) because “actions speak louder than words.” However, the source did not say which of these actions or statements were correlated with which letter grades.
After gathering these metrics, the organization then accounts for “community feedback.” Dobson said in the now-deleted X post that the “community” can submit politicians’ public stances to Stand With Crypto for analysis.
Read More: Crypto Community Cheers Impending Departure of SEC’s Top Attack Dog
The source said that most of the “feedback” they receive is by people on social media tweeting at the organization. Logan Dobson also incorporates what he is told in one-on-one conversations with “key stakeholders,” the source said, which likely include donors and other connections Dobson has made in his 13-year political career working for various GOP organizations.
According to the source, a small team of “researchers” also monitor sentiment on X and other social media. The source would not say how many researchers the firm has, however, and no Stand With Crypto employee on LinkedIn has the title “researcher.” When pressed on the issue, the source hedged, describing the researchers as “several members of the Stand With Crypto team.”
Dobson’s Conflicts of Interest
Dobson himself also faces incentives to reward Republican politicians for their statements more than Democrats. In addition to being executive director of Stand With Crypto, he is also the current vice president at Targeted Victory, a digital consulting firm which is one of the largest recipients of Republican campaign spending, according to Open Secrets.
Targeted Victory has been paid over $75 million from the Republican National Committee and other Republican campaign groups this year alone. Targeted Victory specializes in manipulating news coverage, has been linked to media campaigns critical of TikTok, and Brazil’s suspension of X, and is working with dozens of Republican members of Congress this cycle. It also has its own cryptocurrency practice which, like Stand with Crypto, describes itself as “bipartisan.”
Before working at Targeted Victory, Dobson worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, former Colorado Republican Senator Cory Gardner, and Republican strategic research and polling firm The Tarrance Group.
Read More: Senate Votes to Kill SAB 121 Custody Bill: How Crypto Became So Political
Fairshake Affiliation or Lack Thereof
The source also denied any affiliation with Fairshake, another major bipartisan group in the crypto advocacy space. Fairshake is one of the largest Political Action Committees (PACs) investing in House and Senate races this election cycle, spending over $132 million to back pro-crypto candidates, according to Open Secrets. Coinbase, which established Stand With Crypto, donated $25 million to the PAC in June and another $25 million on Wednesday. Whereas Stand With Crypto is technically a nonprofit, legally forbidden from interfering with political campaigns, a PAC is a different type of organization which exists for the explicit purpose of spending money to elect or defeat political candidates.
Despite allegedly having no affiliation to the PAC, Stand With Crypto lumps together its own fundraising with Fairshake’s on its home page. At the time of publishing, the webpage says that over $206 million has been “donated to crypto advocates,” $204 million of which has been donated to Fairshake. According to Open Secrets, Stand With Crypto’s own PAC has spent just $139.94 this election cycle, a negligible amount in federal campaigns.
Unchained reached out to several other political operatives asking why Stand With Crypto would deny the affiliation, in lieu of an answer from the organization itself. For one source, it seemed obvious: Fairshake, as detailed in a New Yorker article last month, has angered politicians on both sides of the aisle for its aggressive investment in tight political races, often by running abrasive attack ads. “Considering how pissed-off everyone is at Fairshake right now, that doesn’t surprise me,” one of the sources said. This person went on to refer to Fairshake and Stand With Crypto interchangeably, in a series of Freudian slips.
Read More: The One Senate Race That Could Give Elizabeth Warren More Power Over Crypto
When asked about the Stand With Crypto PAC’s low fundraising numbers, the source at Stand With Crypto said the organization’s own PAC exists to “endorse candidates and to provide certain information that we’re allowed to provide through our PAC but that we couldn’t from our 501(c)(4).”
A 501(c)(4) non-profit organization, like Stand With Crypto, is allowed to promote social welfare but not participate or intervene in political campaigns or to endorse candidates. In the case of Stand With Crypto, that social welfare issue is the need to turn crypto owners into crypto voters.
In its pursuit of mobilizing Americans who have owned crypto — a number Coinbase and Stand With Crypto put at 52 million, similar to Pew Research’s estimates — Stand With Crypto also hosts online modules which allow users to check their voter registration, find a polling location, and learn about ways to vote early. It has also been texting voters in key swing states like Ohio, hosting activations complete with live music from rock duo The Black Keys, and organizing panels at social venues like New York Bitcoin bar Pubkey. According to its homepage, over 530,000 have prepared to vote using Stand With Crypto’s tools.