Crypto PAC Fairshake Wins Four of Five Primaries, Fails to Sink Crypto-Skeptic Gilbert in Florida

4 min readPublished 23 Aug 2026

The crypto industry’s best-funded political action committee had a mixed night at the ballot box on Tuesday, and the sharpest split isn’t between winners and losers — it’s between how crypto trade press and local political reporters told the story.

Fairshake, along with its affiliated PACs Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs, backed five candidates across primaries in Florida, Alaska and Wyoming, according to Cointelegraph. Four of them won or are positioned to advance. The exception was Florida’s 24th congressional district, where the PAC’s affiliate spent more than $2 million trying to stop Oliver Gilbert — and failed. Both Cointelegraph and Crypto Briefing put the anti-Gilbert spend at just over $2 million, one of the few figures in this story that both outlets independently confirm.

Gilbert, a Miami-Dade County commissioner, defeated a crowded Democratic field that included state Sen. Shevrin Jones and former U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek. Cointelegraph reported he won with 34.4% of the vote. CBS Miami, covering the race from the ground, reported only that Jones was trailing Gilbert by about 2 percentage points before he conceded on primary night — it did not independently publish Gilbert’s full vote share, so that number rests on Cointelegraph alone among the outlets reviewed here.

Where the coverage agrees — and where it doesn’t mention the PAC at all

This is the gap worth sitting with. CBS Miami’s report identifies Gilbert’s opponent in November as Republican T.E. Brown, notes he succeeds retiring Rep. Frederica Wilson, and quotes Gilbert calling affordability the district’s defining issue:

“It’s definitely affordability”

Nowhere in CBS Miami’s account does Fairshake, Protect Progress, the $2 million ad campaign, or the crypto industry appear. The station’s coverage treats the race as a local contest over healthcare and cost of living, not as a proxy fight over crypto policy.

The crypto trade press told a different story. Cointelegraph, citing an Aug. 12 Miami Herald report, wrote that Gilbert had accused “[Donald] Trump’s tech billionaire buddies” of funding “crypto con artists trying to buy a Democratic primary.” Both Cointelegraph and Crypto Briefing reported that the Protect Progress ads used mocked-up Miami Herald headlines, and that the Herald said its reporting had been misrepresented — Crypto Briefing specified three headlines were the source of the complaint. A spokesperson for the PAC, quoted by Cointelegraph, said

“the underlying facts in our ad are true”

Crypto Briefing separately reported that Fairshake spokesman Geoff Vetter defended the ads as factually accurate, without providing a direct quote.

Gilbert did not raise the crypto industry or the ad fight in his acceptance speech, according to Cointelegraph.

The numbers: what’s shared, what’s single-sourced

Cointelegraph reported that the Fairshake-affiliated PACs spent about $3.6 million combined across the Alaska, Florida and Wyoming races — a figure not corroborated elsewhere in the reporting reviewed. Within that total, Cointelegraph said Protect Progress spent more than $150,000 supporting Lois Frankel’s winning primary bid in Florida’s 23rd district, and that Defend American Jobs spent a combined $1.5 million backing Nick Begich in Alaska, Sydney Gruters in Florida’s 16th district, and Sen. Harriet Hageman in Wyoming. Gruters and Hageman won their primaries outright; Cointelegraph described Begich as expected to advance rather than confirmed a winner. Crypto Briefing, by contrast, characterized all four non-Gilbert races as wins for Fairshake-backed candidates, without distinguishing Begich’s status.

Crypto Briefing alone reported that the four wins brought Fairshake’s cumulative congressional primary record to 49 victories out of 53 contests this cycle — a claim Cointelegraph’s article does not include. On the PAC’s broader finances, Cointelegraph reported that Fairshake held a $193 million war chest as of January, had spent more than $130 million supporting candidates during the 2024 election cycle, and had spent more than $82 million on 2026 races as of June. None of those three figures appear in Crypto Briefing’s account, making them single-sourced to Cointelegraph among the outlets held in full for this article.

Following the primaries, Geoff Vetter said Fairshake was

“just getting started building the largest pro-crypto Congress in history”

according to Cointelegraph.

Why it matters for pending legislation

Cointelegraph reported that the U.S. Senate and House are on recess until September, when the Senate is scheduled to take up a cloture motion on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. The bill passed the House with bipartisan support in July 2025 on a 294-134 vote, per Cointelegraph, but Senate Democrats have pushed for stronger ethics provisions tied to the Trump family’s crypto holdings. Whether Congress flips from Republican to Democratic control after November’s midterms — races that Fairshake’s spending is aimed at influencing — could determine whether the bill advances before 2027, according to Cointelegraph’s reporting.

What remains unresolved

Several threads are open. It is not established from this reporting whether CBS Miami’s silence on Fairshake reflects an editorial judgment that the PAC’s spending was immaterial to the district’s outcome, or simply falls outside a local outlet’s usual scope. Begich’s Alaska primary result is described by Cointelegraph as expected rather than final. And Gilbert’s 34.4% vote share, reported by Cointelegraph, has no independent confirmation in the local coverage reviewed here.