Defend Developers PAC filed with the FEC last month and went public June 3. Its mandate is narrower and more charged than any crypto PAC before it: keep DeFi developers out of prison.
A new political action committee built specifically around the legal vulnerability of crypto developers went public on Wednesday, June 3, 2026 at 6:50 p.m. ET. The Defend Developers PAC, which registered with the Federal Election Commission last month under committee ID C00950881, is not built to elect crypto-friendly lawmakers in the general sense. It is built to protect the engineers and protocol architects who fear they are next in line for prosecution.
"We plan to raise and contribute more than six figures across dozens of key races in the midterms, because crypto technologists deserve champions in Congress who will go to bat for them," said Gavin Zavatone, the PAC's founder, in Wednesday's launch statement. Zavatone serves as policy lead at the DeFi Education Fund, a trade organization that lobbies for DeFi-friendly regulation. No dollar amounts for the PAC's initial funding have been disclosed.
A different lane than Fairshake
The Defend Developers PAC enters a political field already dominated by Fairshake, the crypto sector's leading super PAC, which has deployed tens of millions of dollars across congressional races and closed out this week's primary cycle 11 for 11 - backing Democrats Zoe Lofgren, Ted Lieu, Dave Min, and Rob Menendez, Republican Senator Mike Rounds, and others across California, New Jersey, and South Dakota.
Defend Developers is explicitly not competing at that scale. The PAC's strategy targets incumbents who have already shown themselves to be allies of the developer protection cause, rather than backing any candidate with a crypto-friendly posture. The focus is narrower: which lawmakers will actually shield technologists from legal liability, and which ones won't.
The structural difference matters too. Defend Developers is organized as a hybrid PAC - the same structure used by the Blockchain Leadership Fund, a new committee established by Anchorage Digital and Chainlink. A hybrid PAC can make direct contributions to candidates within FEC limits while also running unlimited independent expenditure campaigns funded by corporate contributions. Most high-profile crypto political activity has flowed through pure super PACs, which cannot make direct candidate contributions at all. The hybrid structure gives Defend Developers a tool those committees lack.
Why DeFi developers specifically
The Tornado Cash prosecutions defined the legal threat facing protocol developers. Roman Storm, a co-founder of the Ethereum privacy tool, was indicted in 2023 on money laundering and sanctions conspiracy charges. His case - and the broader prosecution of developers who wrote code rather than ran exchanges or custodied funds - drew a sharp line in the crypto community between platform operators, who had long expected regulatory scrutiny, and protocol engineers, who had largely assumed that writing open-source software insulated them from liability.
That assumption has eroded. The question of whether a developer bears responsibility for how others use the protocol they built is now a live legal one, and it has no settled answer in U.S. courts. For DeFi builders specifically - the engineers behind the automated market makers, lending protocols, and liquidity pools that form the DeFi stack - that uncertainty is a professional and existential risk.
The Defend Developers PAC's board draws from the institutions most focused on that threat. Members come from Uniswap Labs, whose own protocol has faced regulatory pressure, the DeFi Education Fund, and the Solana Policy Institute. The Solana connection is meaningful in political terms: the Solana ecosystem carries high engagement on crypto social channels, and the Solana Policy Institute's involvement lends the PAC cross-chain credibility beyond Ethereum-native DeFi circles.
Midterm stakes
The November general election carries a specific significance for this effort. A shift in party majority in at least one chamber of Congress is plausible, and that would reshape which lawmakers chair the committees with jurisdiction over crypto legislation. Defend Developers' stated strategy of backing proven allies, rather than attempting to flip seats, is calibrated to that environment: the candidates most likely to return to power are incumbents who have already signaled where they stand on developer liability.
Fairshake's parallel operation illustrates both the opportunity and the gap. The super PAC spent $6.5 million to unseat veteran House member Al Green in Texas last week, replacing a vocal crypto critic with a candidate it views as more favorable. Defend Developers has no stated budget at that level. Its founder is explicit that the PAC won't rival Fairshake's scale. The pitch instead is that Fairshake's bipartisan-candidate model and Defend Developers' incumbent-protection model are not in competition - they are targeting different problems in the same political environment.
What's still unknown
Zavatone's launch statement established the "more than six figures" fundraising target across dozens of races but named no specific incumbent candidates, disclosed no initial funders or amounts, and gave no timeline beyond the general midterm cycle. The FEC registration (C00950881) is confirmed, and the hybrid PAC structure is on the record. The financial specifics will surface through required FEC disclosures as the committee raises and spends.
What is already on the record is the intent: DeFi builders have decided that the legal risk they face requires political infrastructure of their own, distinct from the broader crypto industry's campaign apparatus, and organized around one specific question - whether the people who write the code are criminally responsible for what the code does.
Source: CoinDesk, June 3, 2026, Jesse Hamilton. FEC registration C00950881 confirmed via CoinDesk reporting.