PAC Backed by Chainlink and Anchorage Digital Makes First Endorsements Ahead of 2026 Midterms
The Blockchain Leadership Fund, a new bipartisan political action committee backed by Chainlink Labs and Anchorage Digital, announced its first slate of candidate endorsements on May 21, targeting four Senate contests and six House races in the 2026 U.S. midterm cycle.
The PAC, registered with the Federal Election Commission under committee ID C00918722, launched on March 30 and is structured as a hybrid committee. That means it can both donate directly to campaigns and spend independently on advertising. Its founding members come from The Digital Chamber, which describes itself as Washington D.C.'s longest-running blockchain advocacy organization.
The BLF's stated goal is electing candidates willing to advance clearer regulatory frameworks for digital assets and keep crypto innovation based in the United States.
The Endorsement Slate
The BLF's initial round of support covers four Senate contests and six House races, with seven Republicans and three Democrats across the slate.
On the Senate side, the PAC is backing Republicans Barry Moore in Alabama, Kurt Alme in Montana, and Jon Husted in Ohio, along with Democrat Angie Craig in Minnesota. The Alabama, Montana, and Minnesota races involve open seats vacated by incumbents who are not seeking re-election. The Ohio contest is a special election.
In the House, the PAC endorsed Republicans Houston Gaines (Georgia-10), Jim Kingston (Georgia-1), Jon Bonck (Texas-38, who also carries a Trump endorsement), and Don Davis (North Carolina-1), alongside Democrats Adrian Boafo (Maryland-5) and Christian Menefee (Texas, who won a 2026 special election and is now seeking a full term).
The current round of support takes the form of direct campaign donations rather than independent ad spending. The bipartisan composition is deliberate. Anchorage Digital, the only federally chartered digital asset bank in the U.S. and regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, framed the strategy plainly. An Anchorage Digital spokesperson said: "Crypto policy is being written right now and the companies that show up and engage will help define the rules of the road; the ones that don't will inherit them."
Legislative Stakes
Two pieces of federal legislation sit at the center of BLF's policy agenda. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in 2025, created the first U.S. federal framework for payment stablecoins. A follow-on compromise reached in May 2026 allows third-party platforms to offer stablecoin rewards provided those rewards are not economically equivalent to interest.
The second bill, the CLARITY Act (formally the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act), passed the House in July 2025 but has stalled in the Senate, partly because of banking sector resistance. Prediction market platform Polymarket now places the odds of the CLARITY Act passing at 64 percent, up from 46 percent after the May compromise. Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley has reportedly held regular meetings with lawmakers on the market structure bill, according to CoinTelegraph.
The BLF's endorsement announcement arrived on the same day that SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce confirmed she is leaving the agency in November 2026 to join Regent University School of Law. Peirce, who led the SEC's Crypto Task Force and was widely known as "Crypto Mom," oversaw hundreds of industry consultations and issued guidance on how existing securities law applies to digital assets. Her departure creates regulatory uncertainty that makes legislative fixes more urgent for an industry that has relied on her as one of its most visible allies inside the agency.
A Crowded Field
The BLF enters a political spending environment already dominated by larger players. Fairshake PAC, backed by Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, Jump Crypto, Ripple Labs, and Uniswap Labs, holds roughly $193 million in cash for 2026 and backed winning candidates in more than 90 percent of races where it spent at least $1 million. The Winklevoss-funded Digital Freedom Fund launched in August 2025 with $21 million, and Fellowship PAC, backed largely by Cantor Fitzgerald, has secured approximately $100 million in pledges.
Total crypto PAC activity across the current cycle has exceeded $288 million. No specific funding figures for the BLF have been publicly disclosed; the first authoritative numbers will appear in FEC quarterly filings.
What It Means Outside the U.S.
The BLF's electoral work carries practical consequences for developers and users far beyond American borders. Chainlink's oracle network, which aggregates and delivers real-world data to blockchain applications, operates across more than 700 individual oracle networks, has processed over 1 billion data points, and has enabled more than $28 trillion in cumulative on-chain transaction value. The network currently secures over $95 billion in on-chain value across more than 1,000 projects.
The LINK token traded near $9.49 on May 20 with a market cap of roughly $6.97 billion, ranking 16th by market capitalization, though it has dropped about 6.9 percent over the past week.
In Africa, stablecoins represent approximately 6.7 percent of regional GDP in on-chain transaction volume, driven by remittances, USD savings demand, and inflation hedging. The GENIUS Act's stablecoin definitions are already influencing regulatory drafts in South Africa. Kenya also enacted new crypto legislation in October 2025 under the Central Bank of Kenya and Capital Markets Authority, though a direct link between that legislation and GENIUS Act influence has not been confirmed in the available sourcing.
In South Asia, Indian developers are among the largest contributors to Chainlink-integrated DeFi protocols, and a clearer U.S. framework could lower compliance barriers for builders working on cross-border trade finance and supply chain applications in the region.
Chainlink's work with the Bermuda Monetary Authority, conducted alongside partners Apex Group, Bluprynt, and Hacken, on an embedded digital asset supervision system is also being studied by African financial regulators as a template for real-time compliance monitoring. Whether that model scales globally depends partly on whether the CLARITY Act clears the Senate, and on whether the candidates the BLF is now backing help push it across the finish line.