High -ranking Democrat warns of hard action against crypto

One of the most powerful Democrats of the Senate warned his colleagues to act too hard against the booming cryptocurrency industry, and compared them to the Internet in its infancy.

ron Wyden, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and one of the architects of the US internet regulation, asked the members of his party to protect crypto innovators, despite the concern about fraud and money laundering within the industry.

Wyden's warning comes, since high -ranking civil servants in the administration of Joe Biden try to act against unregulated crypto activities, especially on popular trading platforms such as Coinbase.

Wyden said the Financial Times: "There is obviously a debate [About Stricter Regulation] but I want to be on the side of the innovator. If I think of Krypto, I think of transfers or someone who has removed a child and would like to help him in an emergency instead of going through dozens of banks and credit card companies.

"I'm constantly looking for innovations," he added. "My heart beats there."

The demand for cryptocurrency has risen in a sudden in recent years and has increased the total value of such coins to about $ 2 trillion. Their popularity has raised the alarm among politicians and supervisory authorities, who have warned of the possibility that they could be used for fraud and money laundering.

Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said last year that the cryptocurrency markets were "fully of fraud, fraud and abuse". Last week, four high -ranking democratic senators wrote to Janet Yellen, the finance minister, and expressed their concern that cryptocurrency was used to avoid international sanctions.

In contrast to those of his democratic colleagues,

Wyden's comments. But they reflect similarly that were made by a small but increasingly influential group of congress members who have campaigned for the crypto industry, from Republican Tom Emmer to the Democrat Ro Khanna.

Wyden compared the industry with the Internet in his early days when he and colleagues in the congress work out legal protective measures for online platforms so that they could avoid being sued for content that users publish on their websites.

This rule - Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act - was called "the 26 words that created the Internet". And it has been under fire in the past few months of republicans and democrats, with several congress members argued that it should only be applied to companies that comply with certain principles or rules.

Wyden trial back to rewrite section 230, and argued that the liability of companies for user content would simply push the harmful content into secret parts of the Internet. "You can agree to these bills that sound good, but you will really drive the bad guys into the dark network," he said.

"I don't think anyone will ever invest in anything - especially in the little person - if you make someone liable for everything that is published on the website.

"Why don't we just say the person who produces the content, the person we will blame?