Warren’s Crypto AML Bill Adds Five Senate Cosponsors

Senator Elizabeth Warren announced on December 11, 2023 that five additional senators had joined the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2023 as cosponsors, widening support for one of the Senate’s most expansive cryptocurrency compliance proposals.

The new cosponsors were Raphael Warnock, Laphonza Butler, Chris Van Hollen, John Hickenlooper and Ben Ray Luján. Warnock, Butler and Van Hollen were members of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, the committee to which the bill had been referred.

That committee connection made the development more significant than a routine endorsement. Committee members can influence whether legislation receives hearings, amendments or a vote. Even so, the verified development on December 11 was limited to additional cosponsorship: the Senate did not pass the bill, and none of its proposed obligations took effect that day.

What the proposal covered

Warren introduced S.2669 with Senators Roger Marshall, Joe Manchin and Lindsey Graham on July 27, 2023. The official congressional record shows that it was read twice and referred to the Senate Banking Committee.

The bill proposed adding an unusually broad group of digital-asset participants to the Bank Secrecy Act’s definition of a financial institution. Its text identified unhosted-wallet providers, miners, validators, certain nodes, independent network participants and other people facilitating digital-asset exchange, custody, lending or related services, subject to further Treasury regulation.

If enacted, the proposal would have directed the Treasury Department, acting through the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, to issue implementing regulations within 180 days. It also would have required FinCEN to finalize a December 2020 proposed rule concerning certain transactions involving convertible virtual currency or digital assets within one year of enactment.

Other provisions addressed digital-asset mixers and anonymity-enhancing technologies, compliance examinations, cryptocurrency kiosks and foreign-account reporting. The introduced text would have required United States persons holding more than $10,000 in digital assets across accounts outside the United States to file the report specified in federal foreign-account regulations.

These were proposed statutory instructions, not event-day compliance requirements. Their reach would have depended on enactment, agency rulemaking, definitions and any exemptions adopted during implementation.

Why five cosponsors mattered

The December 11 announcement demonstrated that cryptocurrency policy in Congress was not confined to questions about whether tokens were securities or commodities. Anti-money-laundering policy could directly affect protocol operators, self-custody software, infrastructure providers and intermediaries that did not resemble conventional banks.

Supporters framed the bill as a way to bring digital assets closer to the anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing framework governing much of the financial system. The sponsor’s announcement cited illicit finance, sanctions evasion, ransomware, trafficking and fraud as the problems the proposal was intended to address. Those were the sponsors’ policy claims; the addition of cosponsors did not independently validate every statistic or causal assertion used to promote the legislation.

For the cryptocurrency sector, the central implementation question was whether participants that process or relay decentralized-network transactions could perform customer identification, monitoring and reporting duties designed for intermediated financial services. The introduced language left substantial details for Treasury and FinCEN, making prospective operational cost and technical feasibility uncertain on December 11.

What remained unresolved

Cosponsorship indicated political support, but it did not establish a timetable for committee action or demonstrate enough support for Senate passage. The bill could still be amended, narrowed, combined with other legislation or left without a vote.

The event-day record therefore supports a precise conclusion: five senators joined an existing bill on December 11, 2023, three of them sat on the committee handling it, and the proposal contemplated a major expansion of federal anti-money-laundering duties across the digital-asset ecosystem. It does not support describing the proposal as enacted law or settled regulatory policy.