The United States Senator for Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren 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 suggested that the stance will “push innovation offshore.”
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 2022 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.
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.”
Related: Elizabeth Warren is pushing the Senate to ban your crypto wallet
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, and even suggested that it will ruin the economy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed 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 (DeFi) and Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), while also requiring unhosted wallets, miners, and validators to implement AML policies.
Web3 Gamer: Shrapnel wows at GDC, Undead Blocks hot take, Second Trip