Elizabeth Warren and Others Delaying Crypto Anti-Money Laundering Bill

The lawmakers are in search of more co-sponsors if they reintroduce the bill.

A draft bill that requires crypto miners to follow know-your-customer rules and other anti-money laundering procedures has not yet been reintroduced by Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren and Kansas republican senator Roger Marshall because the lawmakers are searching for additional co-sponsors.

“Roger Marshall and I are reintroducing our anti-money laundering bill to clamp down on crypto crime and give regulators the tools they need to stop the flow of crypto to drug traffickers and places like North Korea,” Warren said about the bill earlier this year.

The bill is contentious in the crypto community for its decision to mandate KYC procedures on groups that do not currently require it, namely: unhosted wallet providers, Bitcoin miners, validators, “or other nodes that may act to validate or secure third-party transactions, independent network participants, including maximal extractable value searchers, miner extractable value searchers, and other validators or network participants with control over network protocols.”

Pro-crypto industry groups like the Chamber of Digital Commerce said the bill aims to stifle “innovation." It says it does this by “imposing impractical and unworkable compliance burdens on industry participants.”

The bill originally was proposed last winter. It is expected to be reintroduced in the coming months.