After unleashing a torrent of spending to help elect the most crypto-friendly Congress ever, the cryptocurrency industry has increased its lobbying spending this year to help it cement landmark legislative wins.
The crypto industry spent more than $18.4 million on federal lobbying in the first half of 2025, according to a Sludge analysis of lobbying disclosures, including second-quarter filings posted this week. Sludge’s tally, detailed in the table below, covers all lobbying spending by crypto companies like Coinbase, investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that lobbied on major crypto bills, and the industry’s main trade groups like the Blockchain Association.
The crypto industry is on track to surpass the amount it spent on lobbying in 2024, according to Sludge’s analysis. And the full sum it spent to push pro-crypto bills is much higher—such as money spent on grassroots lobbying campaigns to contact members of Congress by the Coinbase-founded advocacy nonprofit Stand With Crypto, which does not disclose federal lobbying expenses.
Crypto industry lobbyists have been flooding Capitol Hill this month to push through their top legislative priorities, what supportive lawmakers describe as applying “light-touch” regulation to digital assets. One bill passed by the House during the GOP’s “Crypto Week,” the GENIUS Act on stablecoin regulation, was signed into law by President Trump on July 18. Trump, whose family businesses are launching stablecoin and Bitcoin ventures, said the bill will “make America the UNDISPUTED Leader in Digital Assets,” and took a victory lap for delivering on his pledge to enact the measure. Another bill, the CLARITY Act, a market structure bill for digital assets that would hand oversight of many crypto projects to the industry’s preferred regulatory agency, passed the House last week in a bipartisan vote of 294-134. Yesterday, key Senate Republicans released a draft of their version of the bill.
Here is the breakdown of how much crypto interests have spent on D.C. lobbying, so far this year and compared with all of 2024.
