After United States Senator Elizabeth Warren recently caused a commotion in the cryptocurrency sector by unveiling a bill to tighten regulations within the expanding crypto space, a legal expert involved with this industry revealed that 20% of the US Senate already agreed to support her.
Indeed, according to the lawyer and popular commenter on the courtroom standoff between blockchain company Ripple and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), John E. Deaton, “20% of the US Senate has already agreed to support her defacto ban in the US,” he said on December 17.
Potential to cripple crypto
As it happens, Deaton was commenting on the X post by Ryan Selkis, the founder and CEO of the crypto market intelligence platform Messari, who argued that the crypto sphere should not, “under any circumstances, underestimate Senator Warren’s potential to cripple crypto in the US.” As he continued:
“We are in the fight of our careers, even if her name isn’t on the final bill that has the greatest chance of passage.”
Specifically, Selkis’s response was a comment to the post by Messari’s former senior analyst Tom Dunleavy, who earlier pointed out that none of the bills sponsored by Warren since 2015 passed in Congress, as he noted following the news on her recent bill to crack down on crypto, published on December 11.
Warren sponsored:
36 bills in the 118th congress (2023-24). 0 passed.
103 bills in the 117th congress (2021-22). 0 passed.
98 bills in the 116th Congress (2019-20). 0 passed.
80 bills in the 115th congress(2017-18). 0 passed.
27 bills in the 114th congress. (2015-16). 0 passed. https://t.co/Tyyjw7F7V9— Tom Dunleavy (@dunleavy89) December 11, 2023
More recently, the lawyer popular among the XRP crowd listed some of the politicians supporting Warren’s bill, including Lindsay Graham, a Republican, Angus King, an Independent, and Joe Manchin, a Democrat turned Independent, replying to a comment by XRP_LOON who said Ted Cruz and Cynthia Lummis would not allow the bill to survive.
Furthermore, Deaton explained:
“It’s not that this exact Bill will be passed. People are missing the forest for the trees. It’s the national narrative regarding Crypto that is being framed and controlled. The danger isn’t this bill per se – it’s whether certain aspects or certain language contained in this bill end up in other legislation.”
As an example, he mentioned the attempt at the infrastructure bill and added that 2024 – an election year – is likely not the time for passing legislation, but that it might pass in 2025 “if Elizabeth Warren and the Democrats win the House, Senate, and Presidency.”
Indeed, Warren has recently announced an expanded coalition of the Senate’s support for the bipartisan Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act, which she initially introduced back in December 2022, accelerating efforts to regulate the crypto space and mitigate the financial risks stemming from it.
