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Make Money Online The lawmaker’s objections over crypto abuses are seen as a major hurdle needing to be cleared before the Senate’s crypto market structure bill can move.
Updated Aug 26, 2025, 11:27 p.m. Published Aug 26, 2025, 6:13 p.m.
One of the crypto industry’s central lobbying aims — to protect software developers from being held legally responsible when criminals abuse their technology — may be in jeopardy from Democrats led by U.S. Senator Mark Warner, according to people familiar with legislative negotiations.
The Senate is set to return to work in Washington next week, with the completion of a crypto market structure bill as one of its top agenda items. In the discussions over that bill, Warner is said to have held reservations about the approach in the U.S. House of Representatives’ version of the bill known as the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which gave developers legal cover, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiation.
Warner, a Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, maintains a close focus on national security issues, and he’s said to have balked at the rampant hacks and money laundering concerns that he’s associated with the decentralized finance (DeFi) end of the crypto sector. In the past, he’s raised objections over reports that cryptocurrency may have been used to move assets to terrorist groups, and he pushed a bill in 2023 that looked to saddle DeFi platforms with the same anti-money laundering (AML) requirements that traditional finance firms must meet — a potentially existential threat to the way the decentralized projects operate without core management.
Back then, Warner said such an effort would “help maintain the robust AML and sanctions enforcement we need to protect our national security, while allowing participants who play by the rules to continue to take advantage of the potential of distributed ledger technologies,” additionally noting his views that “criminals and rogue states continue to use crypto to launder money, evade sanctions, and conceal illicit activity.”
Then he pursued an appropriations provision last year that would have automated a process to sanction “foreign digital asset transaction facilitators” – including crypto exchanges – linked to users who support terrorism groups. So he has a background in seeking to hold digital assets insiders responsible for the illicit use of their products.
Warner has, however, demonstrated a willingness to also get on board with bipartisan, pro-crypto issues, as seen with his approval of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act
“With the GENIUS Act, the Senate was able to come together in a bipartisan fashion to tackle major issues related to illicit finance, consumer protection and market stability,” Warner said in a Tuesday statement emailed to CoinDesk. “As we head into the fall, I look forward to working in a bipartisan manner to help address the same pressing issues related to market structure legislation.”
Warner is among the Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee — one of the two panels that needs to come to agreement on the crypto legislation before it can move on to a floor vote. With Tuesday’s comments, Republican senators who have been seeking to fast-track the Senate’s market structure bill now have his open invitation to negotiate a followup to the House’s wide, bipartisan approval of a market structure bill.
Unlike with the more aggressive stance of fellow Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, the industry generally sees Warner as a member with a balanced view on crypto issues, having supported the sector in previous votes, beyond just the passage of the bill to regulate U.S. stablecoin issuers — the industry’s biggest achievement in Washington. Digital assets political organization Stand With Crypto gives him an “A” grade as a lawmaker who “strongly supports crypto.”
When the GENIUS Act was still moving through the Senate before its passage by a wide margin in June, some Democrats had halted the process on that bill to object to security and illicit-finance aspects of the industry (in addition to the potential conflicts posed by President Donald Trump’s own stablecoin business interests.) The disagreements were kicked down the road in favor of an easy passage of that earlier bill, with the knowledge that this market structure legislation would be a better place to hash out those concerns.
That debate is now arriving for the bill that’s the lynchpin of the digital assets sector’s Washington plans. This legislation to set out tailored regulations for U.S. crypto transactions is seen as necessary for the industry to come into its own and to bring remaining institutional players and hesitant retail investors into the realm of digital tokens.
Behind closed doors, crypto lobbyists are wondering if Warner’s background in venture-capital work for technology firms will help them make a case for protecting software-writing innovators from legal liability. In light of cases such as Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm’s recent criminal conviction, the urgency to establish a shield is amplifying.
Read More: Roman Storm Guilty of Unlicensed Money Transmitting Conspiracy in Partial Verdict
UPDATE (August 26, 2025, 23:28 UTC): Adds comment from Senator Warner.
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.
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Unified Crypto Lobbyists: Protect Software Developers, Senate, or We’re Out
Lobbyists and firms such as Coinbase, Kraken and Ripple told key senators the sector can’t support a market structure bill without software developer protection.
What to know:
- U.S. crypto lobbyists are insisting that if Congress doesn’t protect software developers in its market structure bill, the industry can’t get behind it.
- This legislation has been the sector’s top U.S. priority for years, but the industry is growing nervous that the Clarity Act’s developer protections may not get extended to the Senate’s version.
- More than a hundred companies and lobbying organizations signed on to the letter to relevant senators, described as the “largest crypto advocacy coalition in history.”
