Warren Presses Senate to Add Crypto-Conflict Rules to Market-Structure Bill
Commentary by Steven Lofchie
Senator Elizabeth Warren urged Senate leaders to bar the President, other senior administration officials, Congress members, and their families from profiting off the crypto industry in pending market-structure legislation.
Ms. Warren stated in a letter to Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that President Donald Trump has a conflict of interest and earns large sums from crypto while he pushes Congress to pass laws that would benefit the crypto industry. She pointed to the President's 2025 public financial disclosure, noting that it showed he made about $1.4 billion from crypto that year, more than double his 2024 income and "more than any publicly traded U.S. crypto company earned last year."
Ms. Warren cited the Trump family's stakes in crypto businesses, naming WLF Holdco LLC, which owns World Liberty Financial, the company founded by the President and his sons; DT Marks Defi LLC, which she said earned more than $590 million in 2025; and Stablecoin Holdco LLC. She added that unknown "third parties" own 61.75 percent of Stablecoin Holdco and WLF Holdco. Ms. Warren noted that an entity tied to a United Arab Emirates official bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial days before the 2025 inauguration, generating a $263 million windfall, which she called a national security concern.
Ms. Warren noted that the Senate is debating crypto market-structure legislation and that passing the bill without ethics guardrails would enrich the President and his family because deregulating crypto would likely raise the value of the Trumps' holdings.
Commentary
The issue of the enrichment of government officials, or their family members, is a tough one. While Senator Warren has reasonable concerns, there are a number of problems with her position.
First, her concerns are selective; they were not expressed when Hunter Biden was serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company or selling his art at remarkable prices.
More importantly, as far as crypto is concerned, the reality is that it has already been deregulated; there is no set of governing regulations. Much of this is due to the failure of the SEC during the tenure of President Joe Biden and Chair Gary Gensler to seek legislation to regulate crypto. Instead, Mr. Gensler essentially took the view that virtually all crypto assets were securities, a legally dubious position that cannot be revived. Had the SEC and the Democratic majority attempted during the Biden administration to develop a real regulatory scheme for crypto, there would have been no opportunity for the Trump family to benefit from that failure to legislate.
Where we are now, there is no possibility of returning to the Gensler position that all crypto (except Bitcoin) is a security and therefore subject to securities registration requirements. Nor is there any basis for Ms. Warren to seize assets from the Trumps.
As a practical matter, there should be some form of regulation governing crypto assets. Ms. Warren does not serve the interests of the country by discouraging the passage of crypto legislation that would enable the development of a regulatory scheme to protect investors in crypto assets, which currently are wholly unregulated due to the congressional preference for scoring points over governing. Time for Congress to gnash their teeth and just get legislation done and move on.