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In a 68-30 vote on Tuesday evening, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the GENIUS Act with bipartisan support. Eighteen Democrats joined the majority of Republicans in passing the bill, which is the first to establish a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, crypto tokens that are pegged to the value of the US dollar.
Its passage had not always been assured. Back in May, nine Democrats who’d previously supported the GENIUS Act suddenly reversed course, asking to revise the bill’s text, and days later, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-WA) successfully killed an attempt to bring the bill to a floor vote by citing several current events involving the Trump family’s crypto ventures, including a controversial dinner for people holding large amounts of their memecoin $TRUMP.
Warren, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee and a longtime consumer protection hawk, ultimately voted against the final version of the GENIUS Act. During a June 11th floor speech, she stated that the bill did not have adequate regulatory guardrails in place to prevent corruption: “It would make Trump the regulator of his own financial company and, importantly, the regulator of his competitors.”
It’s a win, however, for the burgeoning digital assets industry, which has poured hundreds of millions into the political influence game in Washington, hiring political consultants and even a few Members of Congress on their behalf. In an interview prior to Tuesday’s vote, Seth Hertline, Head of Global Policy at the crypto wallet company Ledger, described the GENIUS Act as a political bellwether for the industry as a whole. “If the GENIUS Act derails, everything behind it derails,” he told The Verge.
