Here are the key swing state races that crypto super PACs are targeting: CNBC Crypto World

Today, Bitcoin crosses $63,000 as the cryptocurrency adds to weekend gains. Lego's website is briefly taken over by a crypto scam. And James Delmore of Breadcrumbs discusses how wealthy crypto backers are trying to shape the 2024 election with less than a month to go. Welcome to CNBC's Crypto World, I'm Jordan Smith. Cryptocurrencies were on the rise all weekend and that trend continues on Monday morning. By noon Eastern, Bitcoin crossed above the $63,000 mark while Ether ticked up to $24.73. Solana also rising this morning to $148. All right, let's talk about the top stories. First, Lego's website is back to normal after being taken over by a potential crypto scam. On Friday night Eastern time, ex-users pointed out that a banner on the company's website promoted something called LegoCoin. The website boasted that ownership of the token would unlock secret rewards. The site reportedly kept that post up for more than an hour before eventually taking it down. Now, a Lego spokesperson told CNBC that no user accounts were compromised and that the company is implementing measures to prevent this from happening again. Next, the United Arab Emirates is giving the nation's crypto holders a tax break. The UAE updated its tax code to make crypto transfers and conversions exempt from the country's value-added tax along with the management of virtual assets as well. This is set to go into effect November 15th and an English translation from the country's federal tax authority mentions the exemptions will be made for activities going back to 2018. Last, Ben Horowitz of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz says he's making a significant donation to support the Harris Walls campaign. This comes less than three months after he and his co-founder Mark Andreessen announced their support for former President Donald Trump. In an internal letter that was leaked Friday, Horowitz says he's known and been a great friend of Kamala Harris for more than 10 years. He goes on to say that A16Z, as a firm, continues to take positions consistent with what it believes would support startups in the tech industry. His letter addresses that while Harris hasn't stated her intentions yet, he's spoken with her about tech policies and is hopeful her administration would be better than President Biden's, whose administration he says has been exceptionally destructive to crypto and AI. Horowitz confirmed the letter in a post on X Friday night and said there's nothing else, no matter how it gets characterized. All right, sticking with crypto's role in the 2024 race for our main story, we've talked here on the show about how millions of dollars from pro-crypto PACs are pouring into the 2024 race. CryptoWorld's Mackenzie Sagalos actually sat down with James Delmore, market research analyst at Breadcrumbs, about the state of play for crypto in this election. So you've been tracking a lot of the crypto money that's gotten involved in the election. What's interesting is that a couple of days ago, we found out that Ohio suddenly had this influx of $40 million of crypto-related PAC money. Walk me through why this Senate race in particular has become such a focus for the crypto community. Yeah, Ohio's an important swing state and also a swing vote in the Senate. So voting a lot of money to the anti-Sherrod Brown candidate, Bernie Moreno. Sherrod Brown is more on the Elizabeth Warren, not pro-crypto side of the space. So they're hoping to try and win that seat. It's an important seat in the Senate. And they can have an extra vote that's pro-crypto for moving forward legislation or whatnot that won't necessarily give the SEC all the power it's given. Ohio's one of multiple races where crypto PAC money has been an important part of the conversation. What other races are you keeping an eye on? Swing states like Michigan and Arizona, $10 million each for Slotkin and Michigan, $10 million for Gallego, both Democrats. Both that money is coming from Protect Progress, which is a pro-crypto PAC, mainly devoted to Democrats or solely devoted to Democrats. They get their funding both from the crypto community, but a lot of it has just come from Fairshake, which also gets its funding from the crypto community. And yeah, two important swing states there, Utah. Before we get into that race, for people who aren't aware, you mentioned Fairshake, you mentioned a couple of other affiliated PACs. Walk me through the biggest pro-crypto PACs this election. So there's four. The main one is Fairshake, of course. Then you have the Defend American Jobs PAC. They're spending money both for Republicans and Democrats. Protect Progress, they're focused more on Democrats. And the Commonwealth Unity Fund, that's solely devoted to John Deaton in Massachusetts against Elizabeth Warren. And Elizabeth Warren, seen by many in the industry as a villain, has been very anti-crypto in her rhetoric and a lot of the things that she's pursued on Capitol Hill. So is there any chance there that Deaton could win against Warren in Massachusetts? No, probably not. But they're taking their chance. They're at least sending a message that they want a more pro-crypto candidate there or pro-crypto senator. But I don't follow Massachusetts too closely, but I know it's probably going to go Democrat. That's the sense that I get from polling and from what people are saying on the ground there. Let's turn to other races that you have been tracking. So yeah, we have Utah. You have Mitt Romney is retiring, and so his seat is up for grabs. They're backing the Republican candidate heavily there. You have Joe Manchin's old seat in West Virginia, a swing state, a very important swing state in the Senate majority one way or the other. And it's going to Jim Justice, the Republican, who was the former governor of West Virginia. And then you also have Indiana. Indiana is somewhat of a swing state, but the senator can sometimes go Democrat or Republican. And in this case, it's going to the Republican candidate, who is seen as very pro-crypto. Now, is this a fair mix of Republicans and Democrats up and down the ballot, or are you seeing the money from the crypto PAC skew in a certain direction? Originally, it was definitely very pro-Republican, but it's definitely evened out, especially with all the money Protect Progress is spending. Probably still goes majority for Republicans, but more evenly split now. And walk me through how effective this crypto spend has been. When you look at the primary elections, for example, did you see that money prove effective in terms of getting the pro-crypto candidate voted into that next general election step? Yeah, they spent a lot of money on the Senate primary in California against Katie Porter. She lost her primary. They also spent a lot of money in New York against Jamal Bowman in the New York 15th District. He lost. And they spent a lot of money in Missouri to get Cori Bush out. She lost as well. They were victorious in every election but six. And I think they won about 40 elections in the primary. And this is across all four pro-crypto super PACs that you've been following? Yes. I'm sorry. Yes. This is across Fair Shake, Defend American Jobs and Protect Progress, not Commonwealth. Commonwealth is just a pro-John Deaton PAC set up by a lawyer supporting him, James Murphy. And part of what you're doing is not just digging through these FEC filings. You're also going to the actual blockchain and you're tracking the donations that have been made in cryptocurrency. We've seen a lot more candidates begin to accept crypto-based donations. Trump started that earlier this year. The Kamala Harris team followed suit. Through which PAC did they begin? Future Forward. She announced they are going to be or they announced they were going to be accepting them. Unclear if any donations have gone through so far to the PAC. If they have, probably off-chain. But Robert Kennedy was the first one technically to do it last year. He accepted Bitcoin donations. I did track. Most of those were done off-chain on the Lightning Network. So they're not really traceable if you look at them. But just according, if you look at FEC data, he got around $100,000 in Bitcoin donations. So how prominent are crypto donations? The Trump team said that they had received $4 million in cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, Ether and some of your other altcoins as of July. But has that picked up momentum or is that kind of a one-off thing right after he announced that he would accept crypto? So a lot of the donations originally went through Coinbase Commerce, where he set that up. And those can all be tracked on-chain. He's got about $100,000 in donations that we can see from that, mostly just from retail individuals who decided to donate money. He announced, or not he, but the Bitcoin conference in Tennessee this year announced that Trump had raised $25 million in Bitcoin donations from that conference. They might have been made on-chain, but we can't really see them unless we know the address that received it or we know the amount given at the donation. For example, we can see on-chain the Winklevoss twins donation. They each gave 15.47 Bitcoin at the time. So we can check that on-chain, just find when that transaction happened and we can see, okay, 15.47 were given. That was the Winklevoss twins donation, even though we didn't even have the address. We didn't know which address they donated it to. So Trump also is accepting donations off-chain as well. So these donations won't be recorded on a blockchain. We'll have to find out when the FEC releases data every three months. All right, that's all for Crypto World today. We're back tomorrow and we'll see you then.