On the finish of a three-hour hearing final month, Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, sided with a gaggle of Republicans in a hotly contested debate. He voted to advance the GENIUS Act, a invoice backed by the cryptocurrency business.
“It’s clear that digital belongings are right here to remain,” Mr. Gallego said after the Senate Banking Committee listening to. Breaking from the committee’s prime Democrat, he known as the invoice a “step in the correct path.”
The vote, 18 to six, was solely preliminary, advancing a invoice that can require approval from the total Senate. However within the crypto world, it was celebrated as a second of vindication.
Mr. Gallego is a part of an more and more influential cohort in Congress: beneficiaries of the crypto business’s largess. Throughout a decent Senate race final 12 months, he was aided by $10 million from tremendous PACs financed by three giant crypto firms, together with the Coinbase digital foreign money change. The cash funded adverts that promoted Mr. Gallego’s military service and help for border enforcement.
Now he and dozens of different lawmakers supported by the tremendous PACs are taking steps in Congress to advance crypto priorities, handing a sequence of long-awaited victories to an business with an in depth historical past of fraud and volatility.
