While Senator Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to cryptocurrencies has already earned her a reputation among the crypto crowd, one of her most recent posts slamming the industry on the social media platform X has received Community Notes throwing a similar argument at her.
As it happens, Warren shared a report by the US Government Accountability Office (USGAO) as evidence for her claim that “rogue nations are using crypto to dodge sanctions and undermine our national security,” as she explained in an X post published on January 21.
According to her, it is “time for crypto to follow the same anti-money laundering rules as everyone else,” for which purpose she said she had prepared “a bill to make it happen,” referring to the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act that seeks to put a stop to crypto’s alleged use in illicit finance.
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Community fights back
Not long after Warren made the post, readers added context via Community Notes, attaching the US Treasury Department’s own February 2022 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment report, which “states that fiat is the preferred currency for financial crimes.”
Indeed, the cited report states that “the use of virtual assets for money laundering remains far below that of fiat currency and more traditional methods,” albeit adding that “law enforcement agencies have detected an increase in the use of virtual assets” for criminal purposes.
As it happens, the Massachusetts senator has long purported that digital assets were overwhelmingly popular among criminals, and the recent rejection of her claims has put to use the feature that Twitter introduced before the acquisition by Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, who further promoted Community Notes.
At the same time, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin credited X’s Community Notes as “the closest thing to an instantiation of ‘crypto values,’ that we have seen in the mainstream world” and “surprisingly close to satisfying the ideal of credible neutrality,” as he said in his blog post in August 2023.
