Despite a relentless campaign from institutional powerbrokers like Senator Elizabeth Warren, the US Senate advanced the GENIUS Act, marking a watershed moment for stablecoin regulation and exposing the limits of establishment resistance.
Opinion by: Zachary Kelman, attorney
In 2021, Crypto-America was in the doldrums. Senator Elizabeth Warren and her loyal SEC enforcer, Gary Gensler, unleashed a blitzkrieg against crypto, bombarding platforms with lawsuits and pushing legislation so heavy-handed that many feared it would cripple America’s burgeoning crypto industry.
The pièce de résistance of regulatory absurdity arrived as a poison pill in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) — the notorious “DeFi Broker Rule.” Under this provision, protocols and node operators were given the Kafkaesque requirement of collecting the names and addresses of every wallet holder on their blockchains.
