Meet Joe Schiarizzi, the Ethereum developer who wants to trade code commits for votes-and become one of the first true crypto-native voices in the U.S. Congress.
Schiarizzi, who has spent years building on Ethereum and contributing to decentralized applications, officially launched his campaign to represent Virginia’s 7th congressional district as a Democrat. The district, which includes suburbs of Washington, D.C., is expected to be reshaped by a statewide ballot measure later this month, potentially leaving it without an incumbent and opening the door to political newcomers like him.
What sets Schiarizzi apart from the growing crop of “pro-crypto” politicians is not just that he knows how to write smart contracts or deploy decentralized protocols. It’s that he is openly critical of both President Donald Trump and of the way Washington currently courts the crypto industry. In his view, many self-styled crypto allies on Capitol Hill are more interested in campaign checks than in the underlying technology or its long-term implications.
According to Schiarizzi, much of the current pro-crypto rhetoric in D.C. is hollow. Lawmakers, he argues, are quick to pose with industry executives, attend glitzy conferences, and echo talking points about “innovation” and “freedom,” but rarely engage with the hard questions: how decentralized systems actually work, what risks they mitigate, and how they might reshape power structures in finance and governance. He believes that without this deeper understanding, policy ends up serving short-term interests rather than enabling genuine innovation.
The political environment he is entering has been transformed over the past year. Since Trump’s return to power, the digital asset sector has aggressively expanded its footprint in Washington. Lobbyists, trade groups, and political committees have poured money into races, hoping to secure friendlier regulatory treatment and fend off stricter oversight. To many observers, this marks a new phase of maturity for the industry. To Schiarizzi, it also exposes a dangerous alignment between concentrated capital and political influence-precisely what decentralized technologies were meant to counterbalance.
That tension is at the heart of his campaign. Schiarizzi presents himself as a different kind of crypto candidate: not a spokesperson for big exchanges or large token holders, but a builder who has spent years immersed in open-source code and decentralized protocols. He wants to bring that perspective into Congress, advocating for rules that protect users and preserve open access while resisting attempts by both corporations and the state to turn blockchain into just another tool for surveillance or rent extraction.
His critique of Trump is intertwined with this broader vision. Schiarizzi sees the current administration’s embrace of crypto as largely transactional-another asset class to cheer when markets rise, another donor base to court ahead of elections. For him, this approach reduces a transformative technology to a political prop, ignoring its potential to expand economic participation, strengthen privacy, and reduce dependence on large financial intermediaries.
By contrast, Schiarizzi’s message centers on utility over speculation. He highlights the importance of building systems that ordinary people can use to send money globally, access basic financial services, and verify ownership or identity without trusting a handful of giant platforms. As someone who has actually helped create such tools, he argues that Congress needs lawmakers who understand not just prices and tickers, but protocols, governance mechanisms, and the trade-offs between decentralization and usability.
If elected, Schiarizzi could become the first member of Congress with hands-on experience writing and deploying Ethereum-based applications. He says that this background would shape how he evaluates everything from stablecoin regulation to securities enforcement in token markets. Rather than blanket bans or simplistic deregulatory slogans, he envisions nuanced frameworks that distinguish between centralized custodians and non-custodial software, between speculative tokens and genuinely useful infrastructure.
His choice to run in Virginia’s 7th district is also strategic. The area sits at the crossroads of federal power, suburban professional life, and a growing tech economy. Many residents work in or around government agencies, think tanks, and technology firms, making them more familiar than most voters with debates about surveillance, cybersecurity, and digital rights. Schiarizzi is betting that a message focused on civil liberties, open technology, and responsible innovation can resonate in a district that feels the direct impact of federal policy.
Beyond crypto, his campaign implicitly touches on larger questions about representation in a high-tech era. For decades, Congress has relied heavily on staffers, lobbyists, and outside experts to explain complex technologies. Schiarizzi argues that this model is no longer sufficient when software shapes everything from elections to banking to national security. He believes lawmakers themselves need a baseline of technical literacy, especially in fields like cryptography, distributed systems, and data privacy, to make informed decisions that won’t be obsolete within a few years.
He also seeks to challenge the simplistic narrative that divides crypto politics into “pro” and “anti” camps. In his view, the real divide is between those who see blockchain primarily as a speculative asset and those who see it as infrastructure for new forms of coordination and ownership. Schiarizzi wants to push the conversation away from short-term price swings and toward questions like: Who controls the rails of the financial system? Who gets access? Who bears the risk when things go wrong?
If he reaches Congress, Schiarizzi is likely to press for clearer distinctions in law between centralized service providers and decentralized protocols. He has signaled support for approaches that hold custodial entities to high standards of consumer protection and transparency, while ensuring that open-source developers and non-custodial tools are not treated as financial institutions simply for publishing code. To him, this is essential to preserving the permissionless nature of public blockchains.
At the same time, he is wary of allowing crypto to become a partisan wedge issue. While he is firmly opposed to Trump and skeptical of many Republicans’ sudden enthusiasm for digital assets, he also criticizes Democrats who dismiss the entire sector as a scam or a distraction. Schiarizzi argues that both parties risk misunderstanding what is at stake: the design of the next generation of the internet and the financial system that runs on top of it.
His candidacy raises a broader question for voters: Who should shape the rules of emerging technologies-the developers building them, the investors funding them, or the politicians leveraging them for electoral gain? Schiarizzi’s answer is that builders need a seat at the table, not to capture regulation for their own benefit, but to ensure that laws reflect how these systems actually work. Without that, he warns, well-meaning legislation can inadvertently centralize power or push innovation overseas.
As the midterm elections approach and Virginia’s 7th district awaits its final boundaries, Schiarizzi’s run offers a glimpse of what a more technically fluent Congress might look like. Whether voters embrace an anti-Trump crypto engineer as their representative remains to be seen, but his campaign underscores a shift that is already underway: the people writing the code that underpins modern finance are no longer content to remain behind the scenes. They now want a say in how that code is governed-and by whom.