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clarity act
Senate Rejects 'Dangerously Weak' Clarity Act on Crypto
"The need for responsible cryptocurrency regulation remains," said one anti-corruption advocate.
Sep 15, 2026
The US Senate voted not to advance a major cryptocurrency bill on Tuesday, heeding warnings from critics that it would fail to regulate the volatile financial asset effectively and would allow President Donald Trump to continue profiting lavishly from it with little oversight.
Earlier reports indicated that crypto industry darling Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) was trying to rally enough Democrats to support the GOP-led Digital Asset Market Clarity Act to get the 60 votes necessary to break the filibuster.
But by Tuesday afternoon, even Gillibrand herself had jumped ship. In what turned out to be a 50-49 vote against the legislation, she joined every other member of the Democratic caucus to vote against the Clarity Act. So did four Republicans—Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), Josh Hawley (Mo.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), and Thom Tillis (NC).
Democrats who voted against the legislation said that a revised version presented by Republicans on Sunday failed to meet their demands for rules to prevent Trump and other high-ranking officials from profiting from their cryptocurrency ventures while in office.
In 2025, Trump reported roughly $1.4 billion in crypto-related income, including hundreds of millions from his family’s crypto exchange World Liberty Financial (WLF) and from sales of his $TRUMP meme coin.
"President Trump, his children, and his Cabinet are making billions of dollars in the crypto space, in part from bilking everyday Americans out of their hard-earned money," said Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in a post to social media. "I cannot in good conscience vote for any legislation that codifies that behavior from public officials."
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who negotiated the bill's ethics language with Tillis, said in a statement that "instead of spending their time twisting themselves into knots to appease President Trump, Republicans should have worked more closely with Senate Democrats to craft a bill that could pass with strong ethics provisions.”
Reuters reported in August that crypto-aligned super political action committees have spent nearly $190 million during this election cycle to support industry-friendly candidates.
"It’s no secret that they are seeking to ram a bill through Congress based upon not the merits of the bill, but the threat that they will spend even more money in elections against people who vote against it,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who voted against the bill.
Ella Fanger, corporate power policy adviser for the progressive activist group Demand Progress, said in a statement that Democrats "dodged a bullet by refusing to go along with the dangerously weak bill that Trump and the crypto industry have asked for," though she questioned why Gillibrand was advocating for the measure up to the last minute, "particularly at a time when she is claiming to oppose Trump's corruption."
The Clarity Act is stalled for now and likely won't be revived until after the November midterms. But Scott Greytak, deputy executive director of Transparency International US, said that "the need for responsible cryptocurrency regulation remains."
"Before bringing it back, Congress must confront two fundamental failures of the legislation," he said in a statement. "First, it must stop President Trump—and future presidents and other public officials—from profiting from the crypto industry while shaping and enforcing its rules. President Trump’s crypto interests make the stakes clear: Public officials who write or enforce the rules for crypto shouldn’t be allowed to cash in on it."
"Second, Congress must ensure that law enforcement can follow the money wherever it moves," he continued. "Unless the bill applies strong anti-money laundering and sanctions rules across the crypto market, scammers, drug cartels, terrorist financiers, sanctions evaders, and corrupt officials will exploit the weakest parts of the system to move and hide their money."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of the Clarity Act's most outspoken critics, said, “Let’s make sure that we do not pass a crypto bill that will let Donald Trump continue to rake in billions of dollars in crypto profits while working families across this country struggle to deal with higher prices and an economy that gets worse by the day."
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Will 7 Senate Democrats Join GOP to Advance Trump's Crypto Grift Legislation?
Crypto industry darling Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is trying to bring Democrats on board despite warnings that a new version of the bill "still fails to address President Trump’s unprecedented profiteering."
Sep 15, 2026
Democrats in the US Senate may be on the verge of helping Republicans pass a cryptocurrency bill that could enable President Donald Trump's self-enrichment.
On Tuesday, the Senate will hold a key vote on whether to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a bill drafted hand-in-glove by the crypto industry that fulfills many of its key objectives, amid a $190 million lobbying blitz.
The bill, commonly called the Clarity Act, establishes what would be considered the first federal regulatory framework for cryptocurrency, which is much looser than the rules that govern stocks and other securities, with fewer disclosure requirements and investor protections.
In May, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, warned that this bill would help to "turbocharge" President Donald Trump's "crypto corruption."
"In just one year in office, the president and his family have raked in at least $1.4 billion in gains from crypto deals alone, and yet this bill stunningly includes zero provisions to prevent that," Warren said.
As Politico reported Monday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), one of Congress’ biggest crypto supporters, is privately urging others in her party to back the legislation and break the filibuster.
According to the Government Transparency Project, Gillibrand is Congress' top recipient of campaign donations from employees in the crypto sector. And as Andrew Perez noted on Tuesday for Zeteo, Gillibrand's 22-year-old son "recently received startup backing from a crypto billionaire."
Politico said there were about a dozen Democrats in the chamber who had "signaled openness" to voting for the legislation, though it did not specify who they were.
Two potentially worth watching are Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), the only two Democrats who voted to advance the initial, even less restrictive version of the bill out of the Senate Banking Committee.
Trump reported roughly $1.4 billion in crypto-related income in 2025, including hundreds of millions from his family's crypto exchange World Liberty Financial (WLF), which is funded by the United Arab Emirates' national security adviser, Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and from sales of his $TRUMP meme coin, a kind of digital collectible that Trump's own Securities and Exchange Commission has acknowledged typically has “no use."
Last month, WLF received preliminary approval from a Trump-appointed regulator to become a federally regulated bank, leading to warnings from anti-corruption watchdog groups that the institution could create a new vehicle for Trump to accept bribes from business interests and foreign governments seeking his favor.
The Trump family reportedly owns about a 38% stake in the holding company for the bank, while Al Nahyan, who is also the brother of the UAE's president, owns about 49% of the venture.
The Clarity Act will require 60 votes to advance in the Senate, meaning that seven Democrats will have to get on board, assuming all Republicans vote yes. Some have demanded that the bill address some of its shortcomings, including provisions that would allow Trump to continue profiting.
On Sunday, with the vote less than 48 hours away, Senate Republicans and the White House unveiled a new version of the bill that purports to do just that, which they described as a "final offer" to Democrats.
But Mark Hays, the associate director of crypto and fintech policy at Americans for Financial Reform, said these changes were mostly "window dressing."
Under the new version, he wrote on Monday, crypto would still have fewer guardrails than other investments, much of its activity would still escape oversight, regulators would still have too few tools to crack down on abuse, and crypto would still become much more intertwined with national banks, meaning that a crypto crash could wreak havoc across the economy.
Hays said the bill's new ethics language also "still fails to address President Trump’s unprecedented profiteering from corrupt and conflicted crypto ventures while in office," a predictable outcome since his own White House approved the language.
The bill prohibits state attorneys general from bringing ethics enforcement against public officials unless Trump administration officials approve. It also leaves the US attorney general, Todd Blanche—who has portrayed himself as Trump's personal lawyer—and an in-house ethics council as the sole arbiters of whether the president violated new rules.
And while the Clarity Act could eventually require Trump to put some of his assets in a blind trust, Hays noted that the provisions "exclude the lion’s share of the Trump family’s existing crypto enterprises, exclude his sons who operate these firms, and allow carve-outs that enable Trump’s branded crypto ventures to continue to generate profits."
Hays called the bill an attempt to “trick senators into voting for a giveaway to the crypto industry and crypto billionaires,” adding that “no one should be fooled” by the last-minute changes.
"It still fails to stop Trump’s crypto corruption; it still allows traffickers, rogue actors, and sanctions evaders to launder money with crypto; it still allows crypto platforms to unfairly gouge customers; and it still allows platforms to pay interest on stablecoins that will drain deposits from community banks," he said.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who also sits on the Senate Banking Committee, has participated heavily in negotiations around the Clarity Act and has said he's not ruled out allowing it to advance. But on Monday, he told Semafor's Burgess Everett that while "there has been some movement," he didn't "think the ethics provision is near enough."
Warren made the case on the Senate floor Monday for her colleagues to vote against the bill, describing the new provisions as a "weak fig leaf that will do nothing to stop him from making his next $1.4 billion in crypto profits" and that would enable his effort to create a bank.
She called on Congress to instead pass her Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act, which would bar senior government officials from owning and controlling a bank while in office.
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Most of Trump's Net Worth Comes From 'Crypto Empire': Report
According to an investigation by Accountable.US, 73% of Trump's net worth may now come from crypto, which his administration is working to dramatically deregulate.
Aug 11, 2025
Over his nearly seven months as president, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has been taking a sledgehammer to regulations on cryptocurrency. A new report sheds further light on the reasons why.
The president may be profiting far more from his "rapidly-growing crypto empire" than was previously known and has used it to dramatically increase his net worth, according to an investigation released Thursday by the anti-corruption group Accountable.US.
While a report from Bloomberg on July 2 estimated the billionaire president's crypto holdings to total about $620 million of his nearly $7 billion net worth, Accountable examined other investments that had not previously been reported.
"President Trump's net worth," the group estimated, "could roughly be $15.9 billion, with about $11.6 billion in uncounted crypto assets." This would mean crypto accounts for 73% of his net worth.
Accountable reached this number by including investments that either had not yet occurred or were not public at the time of previous reporting.
These included roughly 22.5 billion tokens issued by Trump-owned WorldLiberty Financial Inc., which are estimated to be worth about $2 billion in value, but had not yet become tradable.
Other analyses, it said, also excluded the $7 billion in value of the new $TRUMP memecoins released in late July 2025.
"Two Trump-affiliated companies owned 80% of the $TRUMP venture as of May 2025 and were estimated to have collected over $324 million just in fees since January 2025," the report said.
Accountable also factored the holdings of Trump Media—the company that owns the president's social media app Truth Social. In July, the company bought $2 billion in Bitcoin and reserved another $300 million for Bitcoin options, and also announced the launch of its own set of NFTs.
As part of what they called "Crypto Week," Republicans passed multiple industry-friendly pieces of crypto legislation in July, the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, which Accountable says allow Trump to directly profit.
The GENIUS Act purported to create a regulatory framework for so-called "stablecoins," which are pegged to existing financial assets like the U.S. dollar and are poised to become part of the portfolios of increasing numbers of companies. However, as Nikki McCann Ramirez wrote for Rolling Stone in June:
One of Trump's priorities has been the normalization of these so-called stablecoins — a type of asset that his family is now hawking.
Despite the moniker, stablecoins can be extremely unstable. A 2023 study published by the Bank for International Settlements found that of 60 stablecoins analyzed in their review, all of them had become de-pegged from their underlying asset at least once.
The 2022 crypto crash was triggered by the failure of Terraform Lab's Terra/Luna "algorithmic" stablecoin—the collapse of which saw $45 billion erased in the span of a week.
The bill places only very light regulations on stablecoins, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has warned that since he controls such a large percentage of the stablecoin market, their uptake into the broader economy could "create a superhighway for Donald Trump's corruption."
"As soon as the players understand that Trump's intervention is a real possibility, then the stablecoin market is no longer about a careful review of whether there are adequate dollars to back up a particular stablecoin, or whether the stablecoin issuer has an AAA rating," Warren said.
"Instead, the whole game becomes one of trying to engage the president to weigh the end and make one set of coins more valuable, and therefore another set of coins less valuable," she added. "It's corruption, but it's also a market manipulation that ultimately drains away any development...It undermines all the markets at that point."
But the CLARITY Act, which has been passed by the House and now awaits consideration in the Senate, is "the real prize" for the industry. It would dramatically narrow the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) ability to regulate cryptocurrencies—most notably by recategorizing many assets as commodities instead of securities, which places them under the much smaller and less-resourced Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Trump would be one of the foremost beneficiaries of this bill, which would exclude digital assets like his $TRUMP and $MELANIA "meme coins" from SEC regulation.
It would also likely affect the classification of Bitcoin, which Trump Media has explicitly acknowledged would benefit the president. "If Bitcoin is determined to constitute a security," the company said in a June SEC filing, it could "adversely affect" the price of Bitcoin and the price of Trump Media's holdings.
Not only does this benefit Trump, said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk, but the legitimization and entrenchment of these unstable assets has the potential to make the whole economy less stable.
"Eerily reminiscent of the risky behavior that gave us the 2008 financial collapse, Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of casino-like speculation on Wall Street with highly volatile crypto trading in retirement accounts," Carrk said.
"While the Trump family stands to win either way with crypto investment product fees," Carrk added, "throwing such a wild card into the financial system with little to no guardrails could lead to history repeating itself—with everyday Americans footing the bill when things inevitably go south."
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102 House Democrats, Including Jeffries, Help GOP Send Crypto Bill to Trump's Desk
"Congress surrendered to the onslaught of crypto political spending and legitimized the world's biggest Ponzi scheme," said one GENIUS Act critic. "They also forfeited an opportunity to stop Trump's massive crypto grift."
Jul 17, 2025
More than 100 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives helped Republicans send what would be the country's first major cryptocurrency law to the desk of President Donald Trump, despite warnings that the legislation would not only further his corruption, but also "expose our financial stability, national security, and consumer protections to greater risk."
All but a dozen voting Republicans and 102 Democrats—including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.)—supported the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, which last month passed the Senate 68-30, with support from 18 Democrats.
If signed by the president, as is expected, the bill would create a regulatory framework for stablecoins, which are pegged to the value of existing assets such as the U.S. dollar. The Trump family's World Liberty Financial has issued the stablecoin USD1.
@housedemocrats.bsky.social Shame on all of you. You have no foresight and no backbone.
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— Jodi Jacobson (@jljacobson.bsky.social) July 17, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Advocacy groups and Democrats critical of the GENIUS Act, and other bills making their way through Congress during "Crypto Week," have highlighted how the legislation would "bolster Trump's business empire while putting American interests at risk."
Leading House Democratic opposition to the GOP's package is Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who warned last week that "these bills would make Congress complicit in Trump's unprecedented crypto scam."
As Politico detailed Thursday:
Waters and other Democrats called for presidential ethics provisions to be added to the bills, pointing to the Trump family's business entanglements in the crypto industry. Trump and his sons have stakes in several crypto ventures, including a company they launched last year that issues a stablecoin and could benefit from the GENIUS bill that is now awaiting the president's signature.
But a growing bloc of the party has joined Republicans in lining up behind the digital asset industry's Washington agenda, a sign of crypto firms' ascendance as a political force. Companies in the crypto sector have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into influence efforts, and a mountain of super [political action committee] money is threatening to target lawmakers who stand in the way of the industry's goals.
After Thursday's vote, Bartlett Naylor, a financial policy advocate for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, declared that "today, House members piled venality onto perversion onto corruption. In approving this crypto-enabling bill, Congress surrendered to the onslaught of crypto political spending and legitimized the world's biggest Ponzi scheme."
"To add insult to injury," Naylor added, "they also forfeited an opportunity to stop Trump's massive crypto grift, some of the most heinous and flagrant corruption in American presidential history."
RM @repmaxinewaters.bsky.social slams Republicans’ UNSTABLE Act:“The UNSTABLE Act creates the appearance of a federal framework for #stablecoins, but it does not provide the Federal government with the full authority it needs.” | tinyurl.com/5t2skxvnWATCH: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWy...
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— U.S. House Committee on Financial Services - Democrats (@ushousefsc.bsky.social) July 17, 2025 at 1:23 PM
In addition to sending the GENIUS Act to Trump, the House advanced two other crypto bills on Thursday: the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, which would create a regulatory framework for digital asset markets, and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, which would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
All Republicans present and 78 Democrats backed the CLARITY Act, while just Democratic Reps. Jared Golden (Maine) and Shri Thanedar (Mich.) voted alongside the GOP to pass the CBDC ban. Both of those bills still need Senate approval.
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How GOP's Crypto Bills Would Benefit Trump and His Family
Passing any bill that lets the president "enrich himself from deeper in the shadows is a recipe for American workers getting sold out to the highest bidder," warned the head of Accountable.US.
Jul 17, 2025
A new analysis details precisely how a slate of proposed cryptocurrency bills making their way through Congress this week, if passed, will enrich U.S. President Donald Trump and members of his family who are heavily invested in the crypto markets.
Republican leaders in the House of Representatives continued their fight to pass the GOP's cryptocurrency bills on Thursday, despite warnings from Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups that the legislation would personally benefit Trump.
As right-wing hard-liners on Wednesday thwarted Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) effort to advance the trio of bills, the watchdog Accountable.US released an analysis highlighting how the industry-backed package would "bolster Trump's business empire while putting American interests at risk."
The bills that the House is considering during "Crypto Week" are:
- the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, which would create a regulatory framework for a type of cryptocurrency called stablecoin, and passed the Senate 68-30 last month;
- the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, which would create a regulatory framework for digital asset markets; and
- the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, which would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The Accountable analysis focuses on the first two bills. The group's executive director, Tony Carrk, said in a statement that "the so-called GENIUS and CLARITY acts ironically do nothing to lift the cloak of mystery and unaccountability that shrouds the Trump family crypto interests around the world, leaving American interests at high risk."
"The president has already demonstrated he'll seemingly take money from anyone, even possible criminal elements and foreign adversaries," he noted. "So to pass a bill that lets Trump... enrich himself from deeper in the shadows is a recipe for American workers getting sold out to the highest bidder. The real clarity we have about this president is he fights to give his billionaire buddies a tax break and profit from his office while betraying the working Americans he claims to represent."
The CLARITY Act would "significantly" limit the regulatory role of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), "which already has been severely weakened under Trump and has oversight over many Trump crypto products," the analysis details. It would also "put the less robust Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) 'at the center' of digital asset regulation."
According to Accountable:
- Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which has made a "fast and furious" move into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, disclosed to the SEC that, "if Bitcoin is determined to constitute a security"—which it likely would not be under the CLARITY Act—it could "adversely affect" Bitcoin's price and the price of Trump Media's offerings.
- World Liberty Financial Inc. (WLFI) has disclosed to the SEC that its token sales to "non-U.S. persons" were not believed to be an issuance of securities subject to SEC oversight. In the same SEC filing, it disclosed President Trump as a WLFI "promoter," but curiously claimed he was not actually a promoter for federal Securities Act purposes. Under the CLARITY Act, WLFI could enjoy lighter regulation by the CFTC as a digital commodities platform—or, it could be "subject to almost no federal oversight" as a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform run on automatic protocols, according to Wall Street watchdog Americans for Financial Reform.
- Just weeks after the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins launched, the Trump SEC stated that meme coins are not subject to federal securities law, with one dissenting SEC commissioner calling the guidance "a roadmap for crypto enterprises looking to evade oversight by labeling themselves as a meme coin." Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, said the SEC was shortchanging average retail investors while helping "the president's bottom line." The CLARITY Act would likely shield Trump's meme coins even further from SEC oversight.
A coalition of over 80 groups—including Accountable.US, Americans for Financial Reform, and Demand Progress—wrote to Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday that the CLARITY Act "creates loopholes or confusing legal questions that crypto and non-crypto firms will exploit in order to evade existing regulatory standards, causing more damage."
"The legislation gives the shady practices and endemic fraud in the crypto industry a government imprimatur without adequate guardrails to protect investors and the financial system and unleashes and rewards the administration's crypto corruption," the coalition warned, urging members of the chamber to vote against the bil.
Meanwhile, the GENIUS Act would let banks and private entities issue stablecoins—which are pegged to the value of existing assets such as the U.S. dollar—with "light oversight" and could "enable corruption, screw over taxpayers, and potentially destabilize the economy," warns Accountable's new report.
The publication points out that the Trump family's WLFI has launched its own "USD1" stablecoin, which was used in a $2 billion transaction between MGX, a fund backed by the United Arab Emirates, and the crypto exchange Binance, "just weeks before the Trump administration dropped a securities case" against Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao.
WLFI also announced on social media Wednesday that investors in its token voted to make the crypto tradable on public exchanges. Sludge reported that "the decision could boost the token's price and directly benefit President Trump and his family, who hold billions of the tokens and have already reaped hundreds of millions from its early sales."
Warren, the report notes, has warned that the GENIUS Act would "create a superhighway for Donald Trump's corruption."
They’re calling it the GENIUS Act—but @repmaxinewaters.bsky.social isn’t buying it.She lays it out: Trump’s billionaire donors get richer, 17 million Americans lose health care, and now Congress wants to bless digital money that benefits his inner circle.
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— Accountable.US (@accountable.us) July 17, 2025 at 12:35 PM
After a handful of hard-line Republicans tanked a procedural vote on the crypto package Tuesday, Trump hosted a meeting at the White House and later announced a deal had been reached to pass the legislation.
However, when Wednesday came, "committee chairs pushed back at hard-liners' demands to attach a central bank digital currency ban" to the CLARITY Act, Politico reported. "The impasse kept the House rule vote open for nine hours until GOP leaders finally cut a late-night deal to include a CBDC ban in the National Defense Authorization Act."
Now, Johnson has to juggle the defense and crypto legislation with a Trump rescission package that Senate Republicans passed overnight. As Politico put it: "If something's got to give, watch to see whether all three cryptocurrency bills end up getting a vote this week as planned. One possibility under discussion is passing only the Senate-approved stablecoin bill, which Trump wants to sign as soon as possible, and punting the other votes."
Congressional Democrats are divided on the GOP package, and leadership is not whipping for or against it. Politico obtained a Monday notice from the office of House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) that, according to the outlet, "sharply criticized both a crypto market structure bill and a Senate stablecoin measure that the lower chamber is slated to vote on, but did not tell members how to vote."
Reps. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), Don Davis (D-N.C.), and Ritchie Torres (D-NY) are original co-sponsors of the CLARITY Act. Craig still wants Democrats to support the legislation, Semafor reported Tuesday, and both Davis and Torres joined Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) in a Monday letter urging their Democratic colleagues to vote for it, arguing that "although this bill is not without its shortcomings and may still be improved, inaction is not a viable option."
More Perfect Union on Tuesday published a report detailing how Davis, Torres, and Gottheimer have collectively taken millions from cryptocurrency industry executives and political groups. Responding to the findings on social media, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said that "it's a terrible bill that basically endorses Trump's massive crypto corruption scheme. Democrats will regret voting for it."
It's not just Trump and his family who could benefit from the bills. A separate Washington Post analysis published Thursday found that "nearly 70 Trump administration officials and nominees held cryptocurrency or investments in blockchain or digital-asset companies at the time of their selection, with stakes ranging from small to more than $120 million."
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Warren Unveils Framework for Regulating Crypto Industry and Shutting Down Trump's Corruption
"Nobody wants weak crypto rules more than the president of the United States," said the senator.
Jul 09, 2025
As the U.S. House prepares to vote on the latest proposal claiming to regulate the cryptocurrency industry—one that critics say is actually a "cash grab" that will harm consumers—Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday took the opportunity of a hearing on digital assets to outline her five main priorities for any legislation aimed at regulating crypto.
Along with protecting consumers within the crypto market, she said, Congress must pass legislation that safeguards the country from public officials—including President Donald Trump—who want to personally profit from the burgeoning industry.
Those priorities haven't been addressed, she suggested, in proposals like the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act and the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, which lawmakers are expected to vote on in the coming days.
"I'm concerned that what my Republican colleagues are aiming for is another industry handout that gives the crypto lobby exactly its wish list: the blessing of the government's approval, combined with crypto rules that are weaker than the rules every other financial actor must follow," said Warren (D-Mass.).
Any regulatory framework for the crypto industry, in which investors can use real money to purchase virtual or digital assets and trade them on decentralized, unregulated blockchain technology, must include the framework set up by "the securities laws that have served as the bedrock of our capital markets for nearly 100 years," said Warren—but the CLARITY Act includes language that would allow "non-crypto companies to tokenize their assets to evade the SEC's [Security and Exchange Commission] regulations."
"If we're going to provide rules of the road for crypto, we need to shut down this superhighway for presidential corruption at the same time."
"Under the House bill, a publicly traded company like Meta or Tesla could simply decide to put its stock on the blockchain and POOF! it would escape all SEC regulation," said Warren.
Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) also spoke out against the CLARITY Act's provision on Tuesday, saying the bill would "create a race to the bottom and fuel fraud and financial instability."
With the crypto market growing 15-fold over the last five years, with a $3 trillion market capitalization in 2024, risks to "investors, our financial system, and our national security have also sharply increased," Warren warned in the hearing.
She pointed to FBI findings that Americans lost more than $9 billion to fraud in the unregulated crypto market last year—a 66% increase from 2023‚ and a Chainalysis report that hackers from North Korea were able to steal $1.3 billion from crypto platforms in 2024 as well as $1.5 billion earlier this year.
"Crypto investors should have the same protections from getting scammed or cheated as investors in any other asset," said Warren. "For example, there is no reason that the rules prohibiting stock exchanges from simultaneously serving as brokers and giving preferential treatment to their own trades over their customers' can't be applied to the crypto market too."
Warren also called for legislation that ensures instability in the crypto market won't "infect" the larger financial system by guaranteeing that taxpayers are not on the hook for "risky crypto bets," and that includes commonsense rules to protect national security and fight crime within the industry.
The GENIUS Act, which 18 Democrats joined the vast majority of Senate Republicans in passing last month, did not include anti-money laundering rules or sufficiently close sanctions loopholes, said Warren, with Republicans saying the issues could be addressed in a future bill regarding crypto market structure.
"So this is it. No more kicking the can down the road. Now is the time to solve that problem," said Warren.
Finally, Warren said any bill addressing regulations in the crypto market must "shut down the president's crypto corruption" by prohibiting all public officials from issuing, sponsoring, or profiting from crypto tokens.
Warren's comments came weeks after Trump held a dinner with the top 220 investors in his own $TRUMP meme coin and offered a VIP White House tour to the top 25 mostly anonymous investors—an event that progressive organizers said was "corruption embodied."
"Nobody wants weak crypto rules more than the president of the United States," said Warren, noting that $7 billion of Trump's wealth now comes from his own stablecoin and meme coin, a bitcoin mining company, a "huge portfolio of crypto investments," and includes more than $320 million in fees from the $TRUMP coin—even as the majority of investors in the token lost money.
"If we're going to provide rules of the road for crypto, we need to shut down this superhighway for presidential corruption at the same time," said Warren.
Urging Congress to vote against the CLARITY Act this week, AFR also warned that the "massive deregulatory bill" is backed by "a gusher of campaign cash and lobbying muscle from ultrawealthy venture capital firms and crypto billionaires," with Trump set to "gain the most from this giveaway" after making $1.2 billion in crypto just in the past few months."
"CLARITY (along with related crypto bills being considered) is a custom-built framework that gives him and his billionaire allies a green light to manipulate financial markets," said the group, "while working families are left holding the bag."
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