super jili The Crypto Industry Spent Over $130 Million on the Election. It Paid Off.

Locked in a tight race for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, the Republican candidate Bernie Moreno got a major boost in the weeks before the election: $40 million from the cryptocurrency industry.

The money, which funded ads that aired across Ohio, was the most ambitious effort in an audacious multistate campaign by crypto firms to influence dozens of crucial congressional races. On Tuesday, that push was rewarded as Mr. Moreno, a longtime crypto enthusiast, defeated Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who chairs the influential Senate Banking Committee and has called for strict oversight of crypto companies.

“The crypto army is striking,” Tyler Winklevoss, a crypto executive, cheered on social media. A spokesman for the leading crypto super PAC blasted out the Ohio results in an email with the subject line: “Crypto’s big bet pays off.”

The crypto industry treated this year’s election as a pivotal moment, spending tens of millions of dollars to support candidates who favored softer regulations for the sector. A super PAC called Fairshake and two related organizations, Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs, spent a total of about $135 million, financed by donations from the crypto companies Coinbase and Ripple and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed over 100 crypto start-ups.

The effort amounted to one of the most aggressive corporate spending sprees in modern political history, experts said. And it appears to have paid off handsomely.

A tracker run by Stand With Crypto, an industry group that vets politicians, said that 253 pro-crypto candidates had been elected to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, compared with 115 anti-crypto candidates. In the Senate, 16 pro-crypto candidates and 12 anti-crypto candidates were elected, the tracker said.

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