How Molly White morphed from a Neopets nerd into crypto’s truth-teller

The clock is ticking for Molly White.

Any day now — the crypto researcher doesn’t know when — the Federal Election Commission could act on a complaint she filed against Coinbase in August.

Working with Public Citizen, a consumer rights group, White accused the US crypto exchange giant of violating campaign finance laws as it raised $25 million for a crypto political action committee.

Coinbase rejected her allegations, and now the matter is in the hands of officials. However it shakes out one thing is certain — White, a 31-year-old software engineer with 122,000 followers on X, has come a long way.

Since making snarky comments about rug pulls three years ago, White has now become an inconvenient truth-teller in an industry eager to shake off the taint of scandal and appeal to the mass market.

And by taking on the likes of Coinbase, a company with a $41 billion market value, and rolling out an online tracker for crypto campaign cash, she’s jumped into the heart of one of the biggest stories of the year.

‘I’m used to getting this sort of criticism and the hate that comes with it.’

—  Molly White

Even as Wall Street coopts digital assets and crypto industry stalwarts curry favour in Washington, White is championing a vision of the web as an organic, grassroots space that prizes creativity instead of crass commercialisation.

“The projects that promised to democratise finance have either failed or produced nothing of value,” White said in a wide-ranging interview with DL News.

“With the markets down, most of the interest these days is just very financial — it’s memecoin speculation, it’s Bitcoin ETFs. There’s a lot less starry-eyed pushback against Big Tech.”

Tracking campaign cash

White’s critics — and there are many — may see her as precisely that, a starry-eyed, even naïve, pundit who fails to grasp the business imperatives of the digital assets industry.

White doesn’t pull her punches. She has characterised blockchain technology as a “solution looking for a problem” and has lamented how ordinary investors are regularly hurt by dodgy outfits selling “the dream of financial freedom.”

Yet White is now backing up her zingers with action. First, she launched a website called Follow the Crypto in July to track the crypto industry’s outsized spending on elections.

She’s also written articles to question narratives that industry stalwarts like Coinbase and Ripple are spinning around the 2024 US general election.

This year, the crypto industry has raised $174 million in campaign contributions for favoured candidates, which is second only to Big Oil, according to Federal Election Commission records.

While all this cash is meant to defang the Biden Administration’s crackdown on the industry, it’s also animated the idea that crypto supporters will vote as a bloc on November 5.

White rejected the notion as a myth.

“There’s this story that there are all these voters out there who think crypto is a make-or-break issue, and if a candidate came out in support of crypto they would win the vote,” White said.

“I don’t think that’s true. People care about the price of groceries or whether they can afford a house.”

Meanwhile, her own clout is rising. In 2022, she advised aides to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, on crypto legislation.

In one of the many profiles that have appeared in mainstream publications, The Guardian newspaper called her “the sanest critic of the crypto frenzy.”

White has drawn the ire of many in the crypto-verse, and often their posts are sexist. In August, an X user called her “another childless cat lady.”

‘A lot of the web3 pitch resonated with me. I was like, ‘Yeah, we do need to fix the web!’’

—  Molly White

And in July, Messari co-founder Ryan Selkis said that while he respected White as a critic he also felt “there was a hate in you… a hate from feminism that’s lied to you and made you empty.”

White shrugs off the trolls. “I’m used to getting this sort of criticism and the hate that comes with it,” she said. “I’ve always had a pretty thick skin for that kind of thing.”

Editing Wikipedia

In person, White cuts a rebellious figure. She favours jeans and sleeveless T-shirts and sports an undercut that would bring a knowing smile from Cressida, the camera-toting character in the Hunger Games films.

White fell in love with the web after discovering Neopets, the online game where users care for virtual pets. Keen on writing and research, White started editing Wikipedia when she was 13.

She focused on Wikipedia articles chronicling the rise of the alt-right, and served on the site’s dispute resolution committee. She still helps maintain the site and edits the occasional entry.

Along the way, her passion for what she calls the “infinite canvas” of the web deepened. “You remember the first time when you felt the web was magic?” she said when opening a presentation at the XOXO Festival in August.

One of the reasons she got into crypto in 2021 was the hope web3 would counter the dominance of social media giants and corporate media.

“A lot of the web3 pitch resonated with me,” White said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, we do need to fix the web! We should make it more equitable and reduce the control that a couple of big platforms have over everyone’s online presence.’”

But she was quickly disillusioned by the hype and theft running rampant in crypto. “Normal people were asking, ‘Should I be buying Dogecoin?’” she said. “It was this weird, divorced-from-reality moment.”

Tracking rug pulls

That year she launched a blog called Web3 is Going Just Great, which tracked rug pulls and heists among other issues.

When the crypto industry started building a war chest to influence the 2024 election, White shifted gears.

By January, Coinbase, Ripple, Gemini, as well as private equity firm Andreessen Horowitz, had raised an unprecedented $85 million, much of it via a super PAC called Fairshake.

It was a staggering amount of spending for such a small industry. So she delved into Fairshake’s funding.

Campaign finance complaint

Allying with Public Citizen, a consumer rights group, White dug into campaign finance records and found what she said is evidence that Coinbase was violating campaign finance rules.

In a complaint filed on August 1, White and Public Citizen said Coinbase had a government contract at the time it made a $25 million donation to Fairshake. They said this was prohibited and filed a complaint with the FEC.

On August 5, Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, countered that Coinbase was not a federal contractor because the government paid the company with the proceeds of seized crypto.

The FEC says federal contractors are defined as people paid with funds allocated by Congress. “Seized crypto assets are not Congressionally appropriated funds, period,” Grewal wrote in a post on X.

Grewal also called White’s complaint “misinformation” and dismissed her as someone “with no election law expertise and funded by who exactly?”

Surprised at Grewal’s condescending tone, White replied that she’s independent and supported by individual donations.

“Stooping to innuendo about who is ‘funding me’ is beneath you,” she posted.

White amended her complaint to include Grewal’s rebuttal. An FEC spokesperson told DL News the agency does not comment on pending matters.

Existential

Now, with the election fast approaching, White is turning her focus to social media and “digital sovereignty.”

“I want to write on how to establish a presence on the internet that is not controlled by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg,” she told DL News.

White is unabashed about casting the stakes as existential.

“If we want a truer democracy where people’s voices are roughly equal,” she said, “we shouldn’t be able to have billionaires donating huge, huge amounts of money when ordinary people can’t have that kind of influence.”

Joanna Wright writes about policy for DL News. Reach out to her at joanna@dlnews.com. Edward Robinson is DL News’ story editor. Contact him at ed@dlnews.com.