A look at nine under-the-radar lobbying firms helping influence US crypto legislation in 2023 on behalf of Binance, Crypto.com, Coinbase, and others
Kari McMahon / The Block :
Context & Ripple Effects
Crypto's Washington operation has been scaling since the industry's first institutional foothold — the Blockchain Association formed by Coinbase and Circle in 2018 — through the hiring wave that followed the infrastructure bill's tax amendment, when firms filed over a dozen new lobbyist disclosures in a single season. By 2022, crypto executives had become a major donor class in DC ahead of the federal rulemaking push.
This piece adds the ground-level layer to that arc: rather than relying only on trade groups and marquee names, Binance, Crypto.com, Coinbase, and peers are routing influence through nine boutique firms whose client lists are easy to miss. The spend behind them is real — OpenSecrets put industry lobbying at $18.96M across Q1–Q3 2023, up year over year, with Coinbase the single largest spender.
First-order effects
- The nine profiled firms collect retainers from some of the highest-stakes clients in crypto, giving Binance and Crypto.com — both facing intense regulatory pressure — a lower-profile channel into legislation than their own names would allow.
- Coinbase, already the industry's biggest disclosed spender, is effectively running a two-track influence strategy: visible direct lobbying plus quiet outsourced representation.
Second-order effects
- Boutique firms with crypto clients become talent magnets and pricing benchmarks in DC, pressuring generalist lobbying shops to build digital-asset practices or cede that book of business.
- Trade groups like the Blockchain Association now share the advocacy workload with hired guns whose disclosures are less conspicuous, complicating how lawmakers and journalists attribute positions to specific companies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crypto influence operations mature into a permanent, layered industry — trade associations for public posture, PACs for elections as seen heading into 2024, and boutique firms for granular legislative work — mirroring the structure older regulated industries built over decades.
- Sustained off-radar lobbying raises the odds that future crypto legislation is shaped before public debate crystallizes, sharpening the legitimacy questions that already shadow the sector's push for mainstream acceptance.
The trend: Crypto's Washington presence is evolving from a young industry's ad-hoc lobbying surge into a durable, multi-layered influence apparatus spanning trade groups, PACs, and under-the-radar boutique firms.