Fellowship PAC has spent money on advertising supporting Republican candidates, including Nate Morris and Clay Fuller, as part of its efforts to advance regulatory clarity for digital assets in the United States.
Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street bank run by the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, has donated $10 million to a Super PAC led by its biggest client and designed to elect US political candidates supportive of cryptocurrency.
The bank donated in January to Fellowship PAC, which counts the government affairs chief of stablecoin issuer Tether, Jesse Spiro, as its chair, according to a Federal Election Commission filing made public Wednesday.
The filings offer an early clue to a question that generated months of intrigue in crypto policy circles. When Fellowship PAC and its connection to El Salvador-based Tether emerged last year, political donors and competitor firms were left wondering how the US political spending group might be funded. At the time Fellowship launched, Tether's US business was still nascent.
The PAC's first two donors are both US-based companies close to Tether: Cantor Fitzgerald, which is an investor in Tether and whose owners have borrowed from it, and digital asset bank Anchorage Digital, which received a $100 million investment from Tether earlier this year.
No donations have been registered from entities of Tether.
A spokesperson for Cantor declined to comment, while Tether didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Anchorage said the firm "made a corporate contribution to the Fellowship PAC as part of our broader, bipartisan approach to advancing regulatory clarity for digital assets in the United States."
Fellowship PAC said in September that it had more than $100 million committed "to protect America's leadership in innovation and transparency." In its FEC filing, it lists expenditures totaling $3 million in January for issue advocacy advertising.
In other filings covering activity after the first quarter, the PAC said it has spent $1.5 million on advertising supporting three Republican candidates, using Nxum Group, a Dover, Delaware-based firm founded by Robert "Bo" Hines, the chief executive officer of Tether USAT and formerly a crypto adviser to President Donald Trump.
Already, much of that has gone to support Nate Morris, who is seeking to replace Mitch McConnell as a senator from Kentucky, and Clay Fuller, who was elected in a special election to fill Marjorie Taylor Greene's Georgia House seat.
Cantor Fitzgerald, whose core investment bank and brokerage reported record revenues in 2025, has long been a supporter of the cryptocurrency sector, even before the ascent of its longtime CEO to Trump's cabinet. Lutnick's sons Brandon and Kyle are currently the bank's chair and executive vice chair, respectively.
The firm lobbied in Washington to push for reforms to the Genius Act, which introduced regulations for stablecoins in the US.
Major Client
The first crypto company to receive a US bank charter, Anchorage Digital worked with Tether and Cantor Fitzgerald to introduce a US-based stablecoin called USAT earlier this year. It donated $1 million to Fellowship PAC, according to a filing.
Tether is a major client of Cantor and lent money to a trust for the benefit of Lutnick's children when the entity acquired much of the company from him in October. Cantor is also an investor in Tether through a convertible bond that entitles it to 5% equity in the firm which has been targeting a $500 billion valuation in a long-running private fundraising effort.
Fellowship, which registered as a Super PAC in August, joins a crowded field of political organizations tied to the crypto industry including Fairshake, the group largely funded by Coinbase, Ripple Labs and Andreessen Horowitz. In the 2024 presidential election Fairshake became the largest single-issue super PAC in history.
Other newer political groups tied to the industry include the Digital Freedom Fund which supports Trump's crypto policy agenda and First Principles Digital a group tied to Wyoming's Senator Cynthia Lummis that aims to elect pro-crypto Republicans. Fairshake has supported Democrats and Republicans.