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U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) praised the country's securities regulator and its chief Gary Gensler's efforts to police the crypto industry and called for lawmakers to give the watchdog the necessary resources and powers to keep things going.
Gensler, who took charge of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2021, has made a good start, having had to "put the genie back in the bottle and bring the crypto ecosystem into regulatory compliance" after former President Donald Trump's regulators "allowed it to explode," the senator said Wednesday in an interview with the American Economic Liberties Project.
The SEC has worked to protect investors from crypto products and has prevented "bitcoin exchange traded funds from hitting the market," said Warren, who has been a vocal critic of the sectorparticularly its climate impact. She also praised the commission's enforcement actions against celebrity crypto promoters such as Kim Kardashiancrypto exchanges like COINBASE for alleged insider trading.
Above all, the commission seems to be continuing to increase. It is for this reason that the industry is afraid of a strong second. And that's why he spends millions of dollars every year lobbying to get away from surveillance," said Warren.
Warren has also been scrutinizing the collapse of prominent crypto exchange FTX in November last year, which sent ripples through the industry and doubled regulators' efforts to improve supervision. She has called for the exchange's founder Sam Bankman-Fried to be held accountable to the "fullest extent of the law."
"The SEC should redouble its efforts and use its tools to enforce the rules and where the SEC requires more police officers on the pace, then Congress needs to step up with the resources and the new authorities that are needed to make sure the SEC can do its work at full strength in every corner of the crypto market," Warren said. All regulators in the United States must work together to monitor the many facets of the industry, including its environmental impact of mining operations, she said.
Gensler has been criticized for allegedly holding meetings with Bankman-Fried, once Washington D.C.'s crypto darling and – for a time – the face of the crypto lobby. A CoinDesk investigation in January revealed one in three U.S. lawmakers had received donations from FTX before its collapse.
Warren targeted the cipher hall instead.
"Questionable crypto gamblers are hard lobbying in Washington," Warren said in the interview, adding that the SEC has been "loud and clear" that cryptography should not "get a pass" to avoid long-standing securities laws that protect investors and the integrity of the marketplace.
"That's the way to do it," she said.
