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Led by Senator Cynthia Lummis, arguably crypto's most loyal friend in Congress, the Senate Banking Committee's new digital assets panel includes other fans.
Jan 23, 2025, 4:37 p.m. UTC
The U.S. Senate Banking Committee has officially set its roster for the new digital assets committee, putting Senator Cynthia Lummis at the top, as expected. But it also includes two names that received heavy backing from the crypto political action committee Fairshake in the 2024 elections.
New Senator Bernie Moreno, the Ohio blockchain entrepreneur who knocked off former Democratic Chairman Sherrod Brown, is among the panel's five Republicans. The crypto super PAC devoted a towering $40 million to back Moreno in that contest.
And among the four Democrats, the ranking senator is Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego, who received about $10 million in ad support from Fairshake.
The subcommittee is likely to represent the tip of the spear for crypto legislation in this session of Congress. The House of Representatives had been far ahead of the Senate last year in approving digital assets measures, but the Senate Banking Committee led by Brown had resisted taking up the bills.
With the new subcommittee in place, led by Wyoming Republican Lummis, the industry is likely to soon take up bills. Lummis has authored a few herself in previous sessions.
Jesse Hamilton
Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.
