Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA ), a well-known crypto skeptic, stated on Wednesday that she wants to work with Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump to put an end to the practice of debanking. During a Senate hearing involving allegations that big banks have frequently denied services to business leaders, it showed a significant change in the conversation about bitcoin.
” Debanking is a real problem”, Warren, the leading Democrat on the powerful Senate Banking Committee, said during the hearing. ” This shouldn’t be happening, and we need to figure out why, and who is accountable”.
Some in the digital property market, who have long viewed Warren as an existential enemy, may have come as a surprise from this confrontational stance.
Some bitcoin leaders, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, have expressly blamed Warren for instigating” Operation Chokepoint 2.0″, an alleged Biden-era effort to secretly force banks to never provide crypto-related clients.
Despite this, Warren herself delivered a remarkable statement to a section of crypto market testimony handpicked by Republicans, who all claimed to have been debanked for years, during Wednesday’s Senate Banking reading.
” I don’t believe for a minute you should be locked out of our banks system”, Warren said to Nathan McCauley, CEO of Anchorage Digital, a blockchain network provider.
Of course, Warren does have her own motivations for staking out for a position. She praised the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal watchdog that she helped create in 2011, at several points throughout the hearing as the only official agency responsible for protecting consumers from debanking practices.
Trump shut down the CFPB earlier this week after years of Democratic problems.
According to Warren,” the president needs a solid CFPB as his partner to get this done” if the president wants to stop debanking.
Warren even attempted during Wednesday’s reading to enhance the concept of organizations being targeted by debanking—to organizations, the cannabis business, ex-felons, and Muslim Americans.
Crypto officials appeared significantly caught off-guard by Warren’s queries, which eagerly took their part. She questioned whether the business owners do support stricter rules to stop banks from denying clients, for instance.
At one level though, when asked by Warren to explicitly name the institutions that denied him service due to his bitcoin associations, Anchorage Digital’s CEO pushed up a little.
” Senator, I don’t believe it’s effective to name specific bankers”, McCauley said. ” I think the lenders were the ones who lost here,” he said.
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