Two years ago, a top pro-cryptocurrency super PAC spent $41 million on ads to help defeat Sherrod Brown, then Ohio’s incumbent Democratic senator.
On Tuesday, those results were reversed. Even though the super PAC, Fairshake, spent $46 million on ads against Mr. Brown, he won the election against the Republican, Senator Jon Husted, by a healthy margin.
It was a rare loss for the crypto industry, which has developed a reputation as a political heavyweight and prospered with a laissez-faire regulatory environment under President Trump.
Tuesday’s setback follows years of the crypto industry successfully supporting friendly candidates and targeting industry critics with a barrage of negative ads backed by companies including Coinbase and Ripple. Congress last year approved rules governing stablecoins, helping to legitimize the industry. And Mr. Trump, whose family has a crypto business, has been a booster of policies to benefit the sector.
“It calls into question their strategy,” said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks spending on elections. “Some of these deep-pocketed donors and people within the industry may have felt that their money could go a lot further when oftentimes money is not always the determining factor and there are a lot of other issues at play.”
In a statement, Fairshake’s spokesman, Geoff Vetter, pointed to the group’s other main general-election battleground, in Nebraska, where the Republican senator, Pete Ricketts, won re-election after the super PAC spent $12 million in ads supporting him.
“As the biggest spender in the Nebraska Senate race, we’re proud to have helped Senator Ricketts weather the waves of a hard-fought cycle,” Mr. Vetter said, without mentioning Mr. Brown. “Fairshake played a meaningful role in winning competitive races across the country in 2026 and we will do it again in 2028.”
Mr. Brown’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While Mr. Brown toned down his earlier criticism of the crypto industry during his 2026 campaign, he maintained that he did not want the industry to write its own rules.
“They know I’m going to take them on,” Mr. Brown, who has expressed interest in serving again on the Senate Banking Committee, said in October.
Cryptocurrencies, which allow people to make payments pseudonymously and are tracked in a centralized ledger, have become more mainstream in recent years. Crypto companies have bought Super Bowl advertisements and have marketed themselves as a legitimate frontier of the financial system.
Mr. Trump has also personally profited from his family’s crypto business, World Liberty Financial, which sells its own digital tokens. The president earned $1.4 billion from his family’s crypto businesses in 2025, according to financial disclosures.
But the crypto industry has also been plagued by scandal, including a $6.3 billion heist last week from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
Mr. Brown was a prominent critic of the crypto industry when he served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 2021 to 2024. He said cryptocurrencies could be used by fraudsters and criminals, and called for rules to protect consumers from the financial risks associated with the largely unregulated technology.
Mr. Brown’s 2024 defeat helped the crypto industry establish itself as a political force. The year before, Fairshake had been established with backing from leading crypto firms and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in crypto start-ups.
In 2024, the super PAC, along with two of its affiliates, spent about $135 million on elections around the country to promote its agenda. A significant portion of that sum was spent to defeat Mr. Brown, who lost to the Republican, Bernie Moreno, an Ohio businessman who had founded a crypto company.
The industry’s bet on politics appeared to pay off. Last year, Congress passed a law, called the Genius Act, that created regulations for stablecoins, a cryptocurrency that is linked to an asset like the U.S. dollar.
But in September, Congress failed to advance legislation, known as the Clarity Act, that would have established additional business-friendly rules for crypto. Democrats objected to Mr. Trump’s personal windfall from his cryptocurrency firm.
Fairshake announced days later that it would spend tens of millions of dollars to oppose Mr. Brown’s candidacy.
Unlike in 2024, the crypto industry’s ads may have failed to land in a race that was unusually linked to how voters felt about the president, said John Forren, an associate professor of political science at Miami University of Ohio.
The Ohio Senate race was also deluged with hundreds of millions of dollars in ads, potentially drowning out the crypto industry messages, he said. More than $516 million was spent on advertising, making it the most expensive general election in the country, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.
“Will this be seen as just an enormous misallocation of money by the crypto industry? Perhaps,” Mr. Forren said.
The post Ohio’s Senate Race Is a Rare Loss for Crypto Under Trump appeared first on New York Times.
