Avoiding crypto isn't enough — it needs to be actively countered and regulated to avoid widespread societal and political harms. This is the message that emerged from my conversation with crypto experts Molly White and Tonantzin Carmona.

Cryptocurrency has stopped being a finance story. Heading into the 2026 midterms, it has become political-money infrastructure — woven into our elections, our regulations, the Trump family's balance sheet.

To open Season 4 of Dave Troy Presents, I sat down with two of the sharpest people on this beat. Independent researcher Molly White tracks the industry through her websites Citation Needed, Web3 Is Going Just Great, and her election-money tracker Follow the Crypto.

Brookings Institution fellow Tonantzin Carmona maps the structural harm: who gets targeted, who gets hurt, and the policies that need to change.

The conversation is a plain-English tour of where things actually stand. The SEC has reversed course and largely stopped enforcing against crypto. The industry's super PACs spent hundreds of millions in 2024 and are gearing up for more — and as the Illinois primary showed, often in races where the ads never mention crypto at all.