The Crypto Congress

• Key findings
• 20 members disclosed buying crypto-linked tickers (COIN, MSTR, HOOD, BITB, IBIT…) — bipartisan, mostly across 2025.
• Sen. David McCormick (R-PA), on Senate Banking, bought the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF 22 times in 2025 — ~$1.14M disclosed.
• The same year, Congress repealed the IRS crypto-broker rule (HJRES.25, enacted Apr 10, 2025); the model flags Coinbase and MicroStrategy as winners.
• Rep. Jefferson Shreve (R-IN) disclosed a Coinbase + MicroStrategy buy on Feb 24, 2025 — two days before the resolution's committee report (verify against the PTR).
• Trading crypto is legal with disclosure. This is an overlap between what Congress deregulated and what it owned, not an insider-trading claim.

1. Introduction: deregulate it, then buy it

2025 was crypto's year in Washington. After a decade of regulatory hostility, Congress moved to make digital assets easier to own, trade, and build on — and the most concrete step was a repeal. Using the Congressional Review Act, Congress nullified an IRS rule that would have forced “brokers,” including decentralized-finance platforms, to report their customers' crypto proceeds. The reporting burden vanished; the industry exhaled.

This paper sets that policy beside a second public record: what Congress's own members were buying. The answer is that the same year Washington deregulated crypto, 20 members disclosed buying crypto-linked securities — and one of them, a senator on the committee that writes crypto's rules, did so twenty-two times. We are not alleging anyone front-ran a vote; we are putting the deregulation and the disclosures on the same page, because they happened on the same calendar.

2. Data and methodology

We identify congressional purchases of crypto-linked tickers — the regulated, public proxies for crypto exposure: Coinbase (COIN), MicroStrategy (MSTR), Robinhood (HOOD), and spot-bitcoin ETFs including Bitwise's BITB and BlackRock's IBIT — from deduplicated STOCK Act disclosures. The deregulation backdrop (HJRES.25 and its winners) comes from GovGreed's legislation database and bill-analysis model. All figures were re-derived live on June 30, 2026.

Three cautions. First, these are proxies, not tokens: members disclose stocks and ETFs, not direct crypto wallets, so this understates anyone holding crypto directly and overstates nothing. Second, 20 distinct members appear in the disclosures; we name the dozen-plus whose records map cleanly to current member pages, and a few buyers are former members. Third, the bill's winners are model-judged, and the overlap we report is calendar overlap — deregulation and buying in the same year — not a claim that any trade was timed to a vote.

3. The deregulation backdrop

The anchor event is HJRES.25, enacted April 10, 2025. It used the Congressional Review Act to erase the IRS's digital-asset broker-reporting rule — the one corner of crypto policy that would have pushed DeFi platforms to report user proceeds to the government. GovGreed's bill-analysis model flags the beneficiaries as COIN (which avoids a reporting and compliance burden on its core business) and MSTR (the largest corporate bitcoin holder). It is one of the sixteen 2025 rollbacks catalogued in our companion paper, The Deregulation Supercut — and the only one whose entire sector is a single asset class.

4. The buyers

Here are the members who disclosed buying crypto-linked tickers, ranked by number of purchases. The list is bipartisan, and it is topped, decisively, by one name.

Member	Party	St.	Buys	Tickers	Window
DMDavid McCormick	R	PA	22	BITB	Feb–Nov ’25
GCGilbert Cisneros	D	CA	10	COIN HOOD	’25–’26
RKRo Khanna	D	CA	9	COIN HOOD	’25–’26
RBRobert Bresnahan	R	PA	3	COIN HOOD	May–Jun ’25
JJJonathan Jackson	D	IL	3	HOOD	Sep–Nov ’25
JSJefferson Shreve	R	IN	2	COIN MSTR	Feb–May ’25
SBSheri Biggs	R	SC	2	IBIT	’25–’26
BGBrandon Gill	R	TX	2	IBIT	Jul–Oct ’25
CFCleo Fields	D	LA	2	HOOD	Jul ’25
STShri Thanedar	D	MI	1	MSTR	Jul ’24
BDByron Donalds	R	FL	1	HOOD	Mar ’25
TMTim Moore	R	NC	1	COIN	Sep ’25

Deduplicated congressional purchases of crypto-linked tickers; 20 distinct members in total, the dozen-plus mapping cleanly to current member pages shown here. Bipartisan: seven Republicans, five Democrats named. Verified June 30, 2026. Look up any member on the Congress leaderboard.

5. The flagship: a Banking senator and 22 bitcoin-ETF buys

Sen. David McCormick (R-PA) is the case the whole paper turns on. A former chief executive of the world's largest hedge fund, he sits on the Senate Banking Committee — the panel with direct jurisdiction over how crypto is regulated. Across 2025 he disclosed buying the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) 22 separate times, from February through November, for a disclosed midpoint of about $1.14 million — steady, repeated accumulation of a pure bitcoin-price instrument, by a member of the committee writing bitcoin's rules, in the year those rules were loosened.

A smaller but sharper timing note sits lower in the table. Rep. Jefferson Shreve (R-IN) disclosed buying both Coinbase and MicroStrategy on February 24, 2025 — two days before HJRES.25's committee report on February 26. We flag it rather than conclude from it: the trade date is in our data, the report date is the legislative record, and the two-day gap should be confirmed against the original filing before anyone builds a story on it. If it holds, it is a textbook committee-timing coincidence; if not, it folds into the broader “traded the sector they deregulated” pattern that needs no precise timing to matter.

6. Discussion

The crypto Congress is a clean instance of a pattern GovGreed documents from several angles at once. It is a deregulation story (a rule killed, a sector freed), a committee-advantage story (a Banking member trading the assets his committee governs), and a convergence story (a dozen members landing on the same handful of tickers in the same window). None of it requires a secret. Congress told the public it was deregulating crypto, and the disclosures told the public its members were buying it. Lined up on one calendar, the two records describe an industry whose biggest 2025 policy win and whose congressional shareholders were, to a striking degree, the same people in the same rooms.

7. Limitations and caveats

• Proxies, not tokens. We count disclosed stocks and ETFs (COIN, MSTR, HOOD, BITB, IBIT…), the regulated proxies for crypto exposure — not direct token holdings, which members are not required to disclose the same way.
• Calendar overlap, not timing. The core claim is that deregulation and member buying happened in the same year. Except where explicitly flagged (Shreve), we make no trade-level timing claim.
• The Shreve note is unconfirmed. The Feb 24 buy vs. Feb 26 committee report should be verified against the original PTR and Congress.gov action date before it is treated as a committee-timing finding.
• Bill winners are model-judged. COIN/MSTR as HJRES.25 beneficiaries are GovGreed model estimates, not price predictions.
• 20 members, a dozen named. Twenty distinct members appear in the data; the table names those mapping cleanly to current member pages. A few buyers are former members.
• Legal activity. Trading crypto-linked securities with disclosure is lawful; nothing here alleges insider trading.

8. Conclusion

In one year, Congress made crypto easier to trade and a slice of Congress traded it — bipartisanly, in the open, on the public record. The emblem is a Senate Banking member buying a bitcoin ETF twenty-two times while his committee's domain was being deregulated around him. It may all be lawful and even ordinary. It is also, laid out plainly, the clearest answer yet to the question the STOCK Act was supposed to make askable: when Washington decides to help an industry, who in Washington already owns it?

Frequently asked

References & data sources

1. STOCK Act disclosures — congressional Periodic Transaction Reports, in GovGreed's Congress database.
2. HJRES.25 — the crypto-broker rule repeal, on GovGreed's legislation tracker; winners from the bill-analysis model.
3. Methodology — GovGreed Research: sources & methods.
4. Companion papers — The Deregulation Supercut (GGR-WP-2026-06) · The Committee Advantage (GGR-WP-2026-12).
5. Image credit: Bitcoin-symbol token — Satheesh Sankaran, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Not financial advice. All data from public federal disclosures.