Elizabeth Warren has long been a crypto-critic, and appears to be making it a focus as her re-election bid kicks off.
United States Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is making her “anti-crypto” agenda one of the centerpieces of her re-election campaign, despite polls suggesting the majority of Americans think crypto is a key innovation for the future.
In a March 30 Tweet, Warren suggested she was fighting to put “government on the side of working families,” and prominently quoted a Politico headline that said: “Elizabeth Warren is building an Anti-crypto Army.”
The “pro-crypto army” took to Twitter to lambast the senator. Popular YouTuber Coin Bureau ridiculed the strategy, saying, “Imagine thinking that building an ‘anti-crypto army’ is going to win you votes?” while crypto advocate Lord TJ wrote that Warren’s stance would “push innovation offshore.”
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While the senator undoubtedly has access to her own private polling on the issues, recent polls commissioned by the industry suggest the stance will not be a vote-winner among the majority of the population.
In a Feb. 24 survey commissioned by crypto exchange Coinbase, a whopping 76% of the representative sample believed that “cryptocurrency and blockchain are the future.”
A survey commissioned by digital asset management firm Grayscale Investments in November shared similar sentiments, with the responses interestingly suggesting that 59% of Democrats consider crypto to be the future of finance. That’s more than the 51% of Republicans who said the same thing.
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However in Warren’s favor, the crises of 2022 such as the collapses of BlockFi, FTX, and Terra Luna have weighed heavily on crypto sentiment among the public, with a recent survey from Morning Consult finding that trust in crypto had plummeted over the course of the year.
The phrase “Elizabeth Warren is building an anti-crypto army” was first featured in a Feb. 14 Politico article, which claimed she was “starting to recruit conservative Senate Republicans to her anti-crypto cause and getting some early positive vibes from bank lobbyists.”
The senator appears to have taken a liking to the phrase, however, considering she has prominently featured it in her re-election campaign.
Warren has long been a vocal critic of crypto, even arguing that it would ruin the economy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published soon after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.
On Feb. 14, Warren vowed to re-introduce an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) bill she had previously pushed, which would extend to decentralized finance and decentralized autonomous organizations, while also requiring unhosted wallets, miners, and validators to implement AML policies.