U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has made her "anti-encryption" agenda one of the centerpieces of her re-election campaign, despite polls showing a majority of Americans see encryption as a key innovation of the future.
In a tweet on March 30, Warren hinted that she was working to put "government on the side of working families," prominently citing a Politico headline: "Elizabeth Warren is Building an Anti-Crypto Army." The “Pro-Crypto Army” lambasted the senator on Twitter. Popular YouTuber Coin Bureau mocked the strategy, saying, "Imagine building an 'anti-crypto army' would win votes?" while crypto advocate Lord TJ wrote that Warren's stance would "drive innovation overseas."
While the senator can undoubtedly run her own private polls on these issues, recent polls commissioned by the industry suggest such a stance won't win a majority of the vote. In a Feb. 24 survey commissioned by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, a whopping 76 percent of a representative sample believed that “cryptocurrency and blockchain are the future.”
A November survey commissioned by digital asset management firm Grayscale Investments echoed similar sentiments, with interestingly 59 percent of Democrats saying cryptocurrencies are the future of finance. That beats the 51 percent of Republicans who said the same. However, in Warren's favor, crises in 2022 (such as the collapse of BlockFi, FTX, and Terra Luna) have seriously affected public sentiment towards cryptocurrencies, and a recent Morning Consult survey found that during 2022, people's interest in cryptocurrencies Trust in cryptocurrencies has plummeted. Year.
The phrase “Elizabeth Warren is building an anti-encryption army” first appeared in a Politico article on Feb. 14, which claimed she “began recruiting conservative Senate Republicans to her anti-encryption cause and lobbying from banks to some early positive impacts. However, the senator seems to like the term, given how prominently she has featured it in her re-election campaign.
Warren has long been an outspoken critic of cryptocurrencies, even arguing that cryptocurrencies would destroy the economy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed shortly after the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
On Feb. 14, Warren vowed to reintroduce her previous anti-money laundering (AML) bill, which would expand to decentralized finance and decentralized autonomous organizations, while also requiring non-custodial wallets, miners, and validators to implement Anti-Money Laundering Policy.
