Why is a crypto industry leader pouring money into Oakland’s election?

As Election Day nears, a familiar roster of groups is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to influence the decisions Oakland voters make about who to elect to City Council or other important offices. But alongside the labor unions and real estate agents, a new power player has emerged. 

Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Jesse Pollak, an executive at Coinbase, launched a group in July called Abundant Oakland, announcing on X that its goal is to “structurally fix the city’s biggest challenges.” A branch of the larger Abundance Network, Pollak’s new Oakland group also set up an independent expenditure committee called Families for a Vibrant Oakland. Independent expenditure committees can raise and spend unlimited sums of money to influence voters so long as they don’t coordinate with candidates. 

So far, Families for a Vibrant Oakland has spent heavily in two local races. The committee is supporting Warren Logan in the City Council District 3 race and Brenda Harbin-Forte for city attorney. 

Thirty-one-year-old Pollak is a cryptocurrency superfan. On X, he rhapsodizes daily about bringing the world “onchain” and dreams of a near future when he’ll be able to buy airport coffee with crypto. He created Base, an effort to build a global cryptocurrency financial system, and was recently promoted to an executive position running the project as well as Coinbase Wallet. 

The crypto industry is a powerhouse in the national and state elections this year, with Coinbase a leading backer of PACs that have spent $134 million so far. 

Up until recently, Pollak’s financial involvement in Oakland politics totaled under $2,000. This election, he made a splash entrance. He’s contributed $145,000 to Families for a Vibrant Oakland, and he’s given over $240,000 to other committees and several candidates running for city office.

Pollak describes himself as a fifth-generation East Bay resident. He spent his early childhood in Berkeley but grew up in Washington D.C. and moved back to Oakland as an adult. He lived there for about a decade and helped start the popular restaurant Daytrip. Throughout his years in the city, he told The Oaklandside, it became increasingly clear that “our current approach as a city isn’t working.” 

Pollak and his wife moved out of West Oakland recently because “city outcomes have gotten worse from a violence perspective.” They decamped to Berkeley, but Pollak emphasized that his wife’s family still lives in Oakland and they have an abiding love for the city. 

His goal for Abundant Oakland is not about cryptocurrency, Pollak said. Instead, the group wants to increase affordable housing, support “vibrant” public spaces and small businesses, and improve public safety. Broadly, Pollak wants to make Oakland’s government more efficient. As an example of inefficiency, he cited a claim also mentioned on Abundant Oakland’s website — that OUSD schools are evaluated using 200 different performance metrics. A spokesperson for OUSD told The Oaklandside this figure is correct, but noted that many of these metrics are required by the state. 

“I’m just someone who loves Oakland and loves the East Bay, and spent my life seeing this city and community not get what it deserves from an outcome perspective,” said Pollak in a video interview with us this month. 

The umbrella Abundance Network has three local chapters across the state. But its branch in San Francisco has been its most active. In recent years the group has scored several big wins in the city, such as helping pass a ballot measure that kept a thoroughfare in Golden Gate Park car-free and supporting a slate of candidates who were elected to the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee, which serves as a springboard to the powerful Board of Supervisors. Abundance has much grander ambitions: on its website, the group says it aspires to “re-architect” how 35% of the country’s GDP is planned for and spent. That’s roughly $9.5 trillion in economic activity.

Abundant San Francisco is one of many groups in the city with similar-sounding names that draw significant financial support from wealthy tech industry leaders. The eastward expansion of the Abundance Network into Oakland is a new thing, and political observers say it’s significant because of the seemingly unlimited amounts of money they can spend on elections.

Abundance Network is spending heavily to support Warren Logan, Brenda Harbin-Forte

Since its launch three months ago, Abundant Oakland’s political action committee, Families for a Vibrant Oakland, has dumped tens of thousands of dollars into two local political races. 

The committee has given a total of $100,000 to two other independent expenditure groups that are backing Warren Logan for the District 3 City Council seat. Some of this money paid for a website, firefife.org, that accused Councilmember Carroll Fife, who’s running for reelection, of enriching herself and allies using taxpayer money and defunding the police. 

Families for a Vibrant Oakland also recently spent about $149,000 on ads, mailers, and polling to support Brenda Harbin-Forte, a former Alameda County judge who launched and led the recall against Mayor Sheng Thao before stepping back from that campaign to run for city attorney. 

Through its Families for a Vibrant Oakland committee, Abundant Oakland has raised $527,000 since Sept. 9, so it still has significant funds in its war chest. Pollak has given the committee $145,000; Konstantin Richter, the CEO of the crypto company Blockdaemon, contributed $60,000. This is the first Oakland political contribution made by Richter, who is from Orinda, according to campaign finance records. Richter did not respond to an interview request. The committee has also received $100,000 from a PAC backing the recall of District Attorney Pamela Price.

In addition to the money he’s given to the Abundance Network, Pollak has personally contributed $220,000 to another independent expenditure committee that is supporting John Bauters and opposing Nikki Fortunato Bas in the race for Alameda County Board of Supervisors District 5. And he gave $25,000 to a committee supporting LeRonne Armstrong for Oakland’s at-large city council seat. In this cycle, Pollak also gave smaller sums directly to the campaigns of Warren Logan and District 1 City Council candidate Zac Unger.

On top of this, Pollak is one of the biggest funders behind Empower Oakland, a group launched last year by former Oakland Councilmember Loren Taylor. Pollak gave $50,000 to Empower Oakland, which among other things helped pay for the group’s voter guide. The guide includes endorsements that overlap with Abundant Oakland’s priorities. 

Bringing an ‘urbanist’ political movement from San Francisco to Oakland

The Abundance Network launched several years ago and helped set up California YIMBY, a lobbying organization that successfully pushed for the passage of state housing bills in Sacramento. The group also launched Megafire Action, which secured tens of millions of federal dollars to pay for wildfire science and technology in California. On its website, Abundance describes “supply-side liberalism” as one of the ideas that power its work: “When incumbents capture the policy process, they constrain the supply of key goods (e.g. housing, clean energy, transportation infrastructure, doctors, good schools). Our current political system exacerbates this by making it easy to say No to new supply and hard to say Yes.”

“We built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4 years. Today it takes a decade to build a bike lane,” says the website. 

“Generally speaking, we are an urbanist organization,” Todd David, Abundance’s political director, told The Oaklandside. “We want to see more housing getting built, we want to see high-frequency and reliable public transit, we support vibrant open spaces, and we support high-quality public education.” 

Abundance has established local chapters in three cities: San Francisco, Santa Monica, and now Oakland. The group is a 501c4, a type of nonprofit that can engage in some political activities like contributing to candidates or ballot measure committees or paying for campaign ads. 

The group’s San Francisco chapter has been its most active. Last year, Abundant SF played a key role in advocating for a proposition to keep a major road in Golden Gate Park car-free. The organization also spent heavily to support candidates in city races, many of whom secured seats in the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee. The committee is also backing several members of that slate in races for supervisor seats, hoping to scoot them another rung up the political ladder. 

In 2023, one of Abundant SF’s leaders, a tech executive named Zack Rosen, contributed $15,000 to support San Francisco’s school board recall and $101,000 to a ballot measure to streamline the development of certain housing projects. According to the San Francisco Standard, Abundant relied heavily on donors connected to the tech industry. 

David said people who worked with the Abundance Network living in Oakland approached the organization about setting up an East Bay chapter. Pollak is “definitely the anchor donor” for Abundance’s work in Oakland, and has brought in some of his contemporaries to help, David added. 

The organization learned the value of building a coalition in San Francisco, David said, and that’s what it has been trying to do in Oakland. He pointed to Abundance’s partnership with the Northern California Carpenters Union, which also worked closely with the organization in San Francisco.

Abundant Oakland is also building a relationship with Families in Action, an Oakland parent advocacy group, David added. Families in Action launched in 2019 to advocate for charter school families and lately has called for measures to improve achievement and equity in Oakland schools. This group is involved in school board elections, but Abundance hasn’t weighed in on those races. David said there are plans to send Families in Action money at some point.

“There are two or three other coalition partners, but we haven’t had a conversation about how we’re talking about this in the press,” David said. 

David currently makes the decisions about how to spend money through the PAC, saying he has some help on these decisions from an advisory board. Aside from its PAC, Abundance doesn’t have much infrastructure in Oakland. But David said there are plans to hire staff in Oakland in 2025. 

“Where we’re eventually going in Oakland is modeled after our San Francisco model,” David said. 

Jim Ross, a political consultant who is working on campaigns to support Carroll Fife and Ryan Richardson,  said the Abundance Network has tapped into a massive pool of money from people in tech who became politically engaged during the pandemic. What makes people like Pollak somewhat unique is they’re very ideologically driven, he said. 

As an example, Ross pointed to a 2020 election campaign funded by Lyft that attempted to unseat at-large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan. There was a material incentive for Lyft. Kaplan had previously tried to pass a city tax on Lyft, Uber, and other ride-hailing companies to fund Oakland’s transportation infrastructure needs. At the time, Lyft was also trying to renegotiate a contract with the city for its scooters, on terms Kaplan said she didn’t support. (Earlier this month, the ethics commission fined Lyft and former mayor Libby Schaaf for breaking campaign finance laws related to the 2020 election). 

Ross pointed to the Abundance Network throwing money at the D3 race to remove Fife, which he claimed is an example of how “their real agenda is pushing back on progressive policies and progressive leaders.” 

“They want a certain political ideology and political agenda, and that’s what they’re pushing,” Ross said. 

Ties with Loren Taylor’s Empower Oakland

The Abundance Network has also linked up with Empower Oakland. Founded last year by former District 6 Councilmember Loren Taylor, Empower Oakland assembled a committee that interviewed candidates in local races and published questionnaires and endorsements. The group’s stated goal, Taylor told the San Francisco Chronicle, is to focus on crime and homelessness and evaluate the performance of elected officials.

Empower Oakland’s biggest funders include Pollak. In August, he gave the committee $50,000. The group’s other backers include Ryan Graciano ($50,000), Ilya Sukhar, ($25,000), and Gagan Biyani ($25,000). Graciano is an executive at Credit Karma. Sukhar is an investor at Matrix, a venture capital firm. Biyani founded Udemy, an online education company, and took a leadership position with Empower in July when Taylor announced he was stepping back, likely in anticipation of running for mayor next year if Thao is recalled. 

Biyani told The Oaklandside he’s known the founder of the Abundance Network, Misha Chellam, for over a decade. He said Abundance shares the same goals as Empower Oakland, such as improving government efficiency. 

“Something Abundant and Empower share is that we don’t want to be transactional,” Biyani said, referring to other groups in Oakland. “If you don’t agree with us on an issue it doesn’t mean we can’t work with you.” 

The group’s endorsement committee is made up of “regular citizens,” said Biyani.

According to their website, Empower Oakland’s 12-person endorsement committee is composed of former elected and appointed city officials, a PG&E lobbyist, the founder of an investment firm, an attorney for a charter school, a representative for a Chinatown chamber group, and Isaac Abid, a real estate investor who helped finance the recall campaign against District Attorney Pamela Price. Abid’s proxy on the committee is Chris Moore, a Piedmont resident and landlord. Moore currently runs a committee opposing Fife that has received money from Abundant Oakland.  

One of Abundant Oakland’s founders, Garrick Monaghan, also sits on Empower Oakland’s endorsement committee. Monaghan previously served as the chief of staff at Riaz Capital, a major developer in Oakland. He also cofounded a company called city3 that promoted a local form of cryptocurrency in Oakland.

Pollak said he got to know Empower Oakland leaders Biyani and Taylor over the last six months and was impressed by their vision for the city. He said the voting guide launched by the group had one of the most rigorous processes for screening candidates he’s ever seen. 

“That kind of work is directly aligned with our vision,” Pollak said. 

Taylor told The Oaklandside that Empower wants to “free” candidates from the “sense of obligation to interest groups because they want a specific decision.” He referred to influential groups like labor unions and developers who stand to benefit financially from the policies passed by elected officials. The Abundance Network shares his group’s ideal of a less beholden government, he said. 

However, the Abundance Network has received major funding from interest groups that try to influence city policies for the benefit of their members. Abundance received a $50,000 contribution from the Oakland police union and $150,000 from the Northern California Carpenters Union PAC. 

Sam Singer, the president of Singer and Associates, a public relations firm hired to represent the Oakland police union, said OPOA appreciates that the Abundance Network is focused on electing candidates who will turn Oakland into a high-functioning, efficient government. 

The Oakland chapter’s “commitment to public safety, abundant housing, and reliable public transit make the organization a great partner for OPOA,” Singer said.

A representative for the carpenters union didn’t return a phone call. 

This election, Taylor said, has “activated people on the sidelines” — including wealthy individuals and people in the tech sector — “because things have gotten so bad in Oakland.” Taylor has said that he’s interested in running for mayor again if the Mayor Sheng Thao recall is successful. 

Some candidates praise Abundant Oakland; others say funding is ‘concerning’

The Abundance Network’s role supporting Warren Logan for the City Council District 3 race reflects a shift for Pollak.

In 2021, when he still lived in West Oakland, Pollak gave Fife’s political committee $900. He previously gave her political ally Cat Brooks $100 in 2018 for her mayoral campaign. 

Pollak said he’s spent time with Fife and appreciated her leadership on transportation and road safety issues. But now he’s concerned that Fife, along with the rest of Oakland’s existing government, hasn’t been effective at handling the city’s structural deficit or building enough housing. 

“When you look at the outcomes that have been driven in the city over the last three to four years, we’re not heading in the right direction,” Pollak said. 

Fife said the idea that Oakland’s problems are the product of the current City Council’s actions is misguided. 

“The systems we’re struggling with now are decades in the making,” she told The Oaklandside, noting that some of the candidates under fire from critics have only been in office one or two terms. “There’s an underlying thread of vengeance,” she said, claiming the groups campaigning against her and her allies are reacting to the recent election of progressives in Oakland and trying to reclaim a majority in city government. 

“We should be really concerned about these wealthy tech individuals trying to design a working-class city in a way that they see fit, without real community engagement or input,” said Fife about the Abundance Network spending.

Logan was not available for an interview for this story. But in a statement sent to The Oaklandside, he said he’s “proud” of his “wide and diverse group of donors,” referring to those who’ve contributed directly to his campaign. “The majority of whom are Oakland residents—who support my vision of building affordable housing, fostering safe public spaces, and bolstering our vibrant local economy,” Logan said.

The Abundance Network is also supporting Brenda Harbin-Forte in the city attorney race. Pollak said he doesn’t have “a deep perspective” that he cared to share about the candidate.

“I’d say again, the whole city is obviously not heading in the right direction, and I’m excited to see change across the board,” said Pollak. Harbin-Forte’s opponent Ryan Richardson currently works in the City Attorney’s Office.

Harbin-Forte declined an interview request but said in an email that she’s had no contact with the Abundance Network. 

“I know from reading the news that Abundant is an important pro-housing, pro-public transportation and pro-public safety organization,” Harbin-Forte told The Oaklandside. “I am honored to hear that they are independently supporting my candidacy for Oakland City Attorney. 

Richardson told The Oaklandside he knows little about the organization beyond what he’s seen in campaign filings. 

“I do think as Oaklanders we need to ask ourselves why folks that don’t live here are willing to spend so much money on this particular local election,” Richardson said. Regarding OPOA’s $50,000 contribution to the Abundance PAC, Richardson said Oaklanders will have to decide if the union’s investment in the city attorney race is about housing and transit, “or whether it’s also about my work in police accountability and transparency.” 

Pollak had more to say about John Bauters, an Emeryville councilmember running to represent District 5 on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Describing Bauters as someone he’s spent “a ton of time with,” Pollak said he’s the kind of elected official everyone wants in government. 

“He comes from a background where he has firsthand experience navigating the systems that are broken,” Pollak said. He cited Bauters’ work getting homes built in Emeryville and improving street safety. Pollak added that he believes Bauters’ opponent, Oakland City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas, is responsible for Oakland’s problems. 

Bauters previously told The Oaklandside that he knows Pollak as someone “who has shared guidance with me on ensuring that the Bay Area is governed transparently and that it has opportunities for employees who want to live here and work here to afford housing here.” 

He said he’s aware that the Abundance Network is interested in good governance and housing affordability, but noted that he has no role in independent expenditures that may be supporting him. 

Bas told The Oaklandside that the Pollak and Abundance Network contributions should raise red flags for voters. An anti-Bauters website her campaign created highlights Pollak’s contributions.

“It’s important for Oaklanders to look at where the money is coming from in this race, and ask why a network that has been based in San Francisco is investing so much here in Oakland,” Bas said. “For someone to drop $200,000 into an IE — that’s incredibly significant.”

Bas said she takes pride in the contributions she receives. The independent expenditures supporting Bas have largely come from local labor unions, which she described as “democratic organizations” aligned with her values.

These contributions include $30,000 from the California Working Families Party and $134,610 from the California Workers’ Justice Coalition, sponsored by SEIU Local 1021. The committee has also spent $114,969 to support Rowena Brown, a candidate running for the at-large city council seat; $17,221 on Zac Unger’s D1 campaign; $41,398 on Fife’s reelection bid; $31,578 backing Erin Armstrong in her campaign for D5; and $4,717 for Iris Merriouns, who is running for D7. 

This committee also spent $7,456 on mailers to support Ryan Richardson’s city attorney campaign. An independent expenditure controlled by Oakland’s fire union paid $43,000 for billboards touting Richardson. 

Another committee, called “Fix Our City Oakland, Supporting Fife for City Council and Richardson for City Attorney 2024 – Sponsored by labor organizations,” has spent $141,454 supporting Fife and $5,328 opposing Logan, and $23,150 opposing Harbin-Forte.

“I’m trying to center my work on collaborative governance, looking at a much more community-centered, human-centered approach,” Bas said. “It should be concerning to people in Alameda County and Oakland that there’s a new chapter funded by folks to have such access to wealth and can have undue influence.” 

National election flush with crypto money

The cryptocurrency industry and its executives have rapidly become a major force in national politics. Coinbase, Pollak’s place of work, was among the crypto companies and investors who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a PAC called Fairshake that began spending in the March primary election. 

When one visits Coinbase’s website, or logs into their Coinbase accounts, they’re met with a voter guide that grades politicians based on their friendliness toward the industry. (Donald Trump gets an “A” because he “strongly supports crypto”; Kamala Harris is ungraded — “not enough information.”)

“This year’s election is critical to the future of crypto in America,” the guide says. 

Some crypto industry executives, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, are involved in a movement to not only elect pro-crypto politicians but also devise a parallel system of government altogether.

“We need to start developing back-up options,” said Armstrong at the Network State Conference this year. “So next time speech or money is under attack, there’s a refuge so voters of the world can make sure they have a place to reside that values freedom.”

The “Network State” is a concept created by Balaji Srinivasan, a former Coinbase executive. He describes the idea as a “startup government” that begins online but eventually acquires real estate to create a new society powered by crypto. There are several of these “states” in the works or in effect, but the most prominent is Próspera, on a Honduran island. Próspera, which is in a tug-of-war with the Honduran government, boasts a “regulatory system designed for entrepreneurs to build better, cheaper, and faster than anywhere else in the world.”

Some of the people involved in the California Forever effort to build a new city in Solano County — namely investor Marc Andreessen — have close ties to Network State advocates. Srinivasan has described California Forever as being part of his vision of “tech Zionism,” creating new ideological states either through settling somewhere or overhauling what currently exists. (California Forever’s leaders deny that the project is part of the Network State movement.)

Pollak, however, said his efforts locally are rooted in helping “make the city and community and systems I’m part of better” — not “exiting” to create something different.

“That’s why I’m here in Oakland, why I’m spending my nights and weekends making Oakland better,” he said.

He does see a future where the use of cryptocurrency is more robust locally. Pollak is part of a group developing a new cryptocurrency coin called “Oak,” designed to invest proceeds back into the community.

There is room for “pushing innovation” when it comes to regulations at the state level in California, Pollak said. But he believes much of the expansion of crypto locally will happen externally to the government.

“That’s the powerful thing about crypto,” he said. “It’s not something that has to be decided by one institution — it’s decentralized, it’s up to the people.”