Coinbase CEO Strongly Opposes Senate’s Crypto Bill Draft

1 week ago7 min read

In a move that should surprise absolutely no one who’s been paying attention, the regulatory claws are out again in Washington, and this time they’re aimed squarely at the heart of crypto innovation. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, never one to mince words, has just thrown a bucket of cold Bitcoin on the Senate Banking Committee’s latest attempt at a crypto market structure bill, declaring it utterly unsupportable in its current form.This isn’t just polite corporate pushback; this is a full-throated warning that the draft legislation, ostensibly crafted to bring clarity, would actually be a catastrophic step backward, worse than the current state of regulatory purgatory. Let’s be clear: this fight is the whole ballgame.The bill’s core purpose is to finally draw the bloody lines in the sand between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), determining which feudal lord gets to tax and control which parts of the digital frontier. It’s supposed to set the rules for exchanges, brokers, and the entire ecosystem.But as Armstrong laid out in a characteristically blunt post on X, after a 48-hour review, his team found a Trojan horse packed with poison pills. He’s calling out what he terms a “de facto ban” on tokenized equities—a direct attack on the very concept of democratizing access to traditional assets—and draconian restrictions on decentralized finance (DeFi) that would, in his view, hand the government “unlimited access” to user financial records.Think about that for a second. This isn’t about consumer protection; it’s about control.It’s the old guard, terrified of a system they can’t monopolize, trying to write rules that would neuter the competitive threat of blockchain before it can truly flourish. The SEC, under Gary Gensler’s reign, has been waging a war of attrition through enforcement, treating every crypto asset except maybe Bitcoin as an unregistered security.This bill, as drafted, looks like the legislative arm of that same campaign, potentially cementing that expansive, innovation-stifling authority into law while paying lip service to the CFTC. For Bitcoin maximalists, this drama is a predictable sideshow to the main event: Bitcoin’s enduring, regulator-proof value proposition.All these altcoins and complex DeFi protocols are drawing the ire precisely because they try to play within, or rebuild, the existing financial system’s frameworks. They invite the regulation.Bitcoin stands apart. But for the broader ecosystem Armstrong represents, this is an existential moment.The “too many issues” he cites are likely the fine print that would strangle composability, enforce impossible compliance burdens on decentralized protocols, and ultimately protect legacy intermediaries by outlawing their truly disruptive competitors. The historical precedent here is the early internet.

#Coinbase

#crypto regulation

#Senate bill

#SEC

#CFTC

#DeFi

#tokenized equities

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