What Congress Actually Traded in Crypto (2026): Every Disclosure, Parsed

Last Updated: August 2026

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. It reports public disclosures required by the STOCK Act. Nothing here is a trading signal — see the section on disclosure lag for why that is mathematically the case.

Quick answer: Across 322 Periodic Transaction Reports filed in 2026, I parsed 1,815 individual transactions. Exactly 21 of them — 1.2% — touched crypto in any form. Not one was a direct holding of Bitcoin or any other coin; every single one was an equity proxy (exchanges, miners, ETFs, treasury-strategy companies). The disclosed value totals roughly $518,010 at band midpoints, and it is heavily concentrated: Gilbert Cisneros alone accounts for 15 of the 21 trades.

Why nobody is handing you this data anymore

Congress has to disclose any trade over $1,000 within 45 days. The filings are public, free, and posted by the Clerk of the House. What is not provided is anything machine-readable: the index tells you who filed and when, and the actual trades live inside individual PDFs.

The free JSON mirrors that used to parse those PDFs — house-stock-watcher and senate-stock-watcher — now return 403. The data is still public; the convenience layer is gone. So I rebuilt it, and the method is documented at the bottom so you can run it yourself.

The 21 crypto-linked trades

Every row links to the original PDF so you can check my parsing against the filing itself. Download the full dataset as CSV — free, no email required.

What the numbers actually say

It is rare. 21 crypto-linked trades out of 1,815 is 1.2%. Congressional trading is overwhelmingly ordinary equities and funds. Any headline implying a stampede into crypto is not supported by the filings.

It is concentrated — but measure it two ways. By trade count, Gilbert Cisneros accounts for 15 of 21 trades, 71% of the entire crypto footprint of the House. Strip that one member out and just 6 trades remain across everyone else.

By money, the ranking flips. Sheri Biggs discloses roughly $175,000 across 1 trade — the largest crypto exposure in the dataset — while Gilbert Cisneros's 15 trades total about $144,508. One member trades small and often; another took a single large position. "Most active" and "most exposed" are different questions, and most trackers only answer the first.

It is not directional. 9 buys against 12 sells. There is no consensus to front-run here, in either direction.

Nobody is buying coins. Every position is reachable through an ordinary brokerage account:

• COIN (7 trades) — Coinbase (exchange)
• HOOD (7 trades) — Robinhood (crypto brokerage)
• SQ (3 trades) — Block/Square (BTC on balance sheet)
• IREN (2 trades) — IREN (miner)
• IBIT (1 trade) — iShares Bitcoin ETF
• MSTR (1 trade) — MicroStrategy (BTC treasury)

The lag is why this cannot be a signal

This is the part most 'follow Congress' products skip. Measured across these filings, the median gap between making a trade and disclosing it was 24 days (range 2–43 days). 0 of 21 were disclosed more than 45 days after the trade.

By the time you can read that a member bought something, the price has had 24 days to move. You are not copying a trade; you are reading history. Any tool selling you congressional filings as a real-time edge is selling you a 24-day-old newspaper.

Limits of this dataset — read before quoting it

• Amounts are bands, not numbers. Filings report ranges like "$1,001 - $15,000". Every dollar total here uses band midpoints and is therefore an estimate, not a measurement.
• House only. Senate filings live in a separate system and are not included.
• Auto-parsed. These figures come from machine-reading PDFs. I have linked every source document precisely so errors are checkable rather than trusted.
• Disclosure is not the same as benefit. Many rows are spouse or joint accounts, and several filings note professionally managed accounts where the member may not direct individual trades.
• Absence of evidence. A trade under $1,000, or one made in a qualified blind trust, does not appear here at all.

Reproduce it yourself

```

python scripts/politician_crypto.py 2026

```

The script pulls the Clerk's year index, keeps the filings marked type 'P' (Periodic Transaction Reports — the actual trades, as opposed to annual holdings statements), downloads each PDF, extracts the text with PyMuPDF, and parses the transaction rows. PDFs are cached, so a second run costs nothing.

Source: Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, Financial Disclosure Reports, 2026.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Crypto trading involves significant risk of loss. Never trade with money you cannot afford to lose. Always do your own research (DYOR).