ShapeShift Responds to Elizabeth Warren
According to a recent statement, the noncustodial cryptocurrency exchange platform ShapeShift refuted Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claims of “illicit financing,” suggesting that she used the platform as a scapegoat to “push” her most recent crypto bill. Senator Warren had accused ShapeShift of “illicit financing.”
The cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift claimed in a tweet sent out on February 19 that Senator Elizabeth Warren made “mistakes” in her “analysis” of the platform during a hearing held by the Senate Banking Committee on February 14 and titled “Crypto Crash: Why Financial System Safeguards are Needed for Digital Assets.” The hearing was entitled “Crypto Crash: Why Financial System Safeguards are Needed for Digital Assets.”
In a subsequent tweet, ShapeShift refuted Warren’s claims that it was involved in “illicit funding” by asserting that it “never handles user monies” and that it is unable to “enable this.”
This comes as a result of Warren’s comments made at the senate hearing in which he implied that ShapeShift had hidden reasons for reorganizing itself as a DeFi platform in July of 2021.
Warren said that the reorganization was done to entice users to “wash” their money through the site.
In addition to this clarification, Shapeshift said that it is “not an exchange,” expanding on the fact that it is an open-source cryptocurrency dashboard that “connects users” to various protocols and platforms.
It went on to say that it cares about the “same things” as Warren, specifically naming “user safety” and “access to innovation” as areas of concern that are shared by the two parties.
By providing a link to its discussion forum, ShapeShift urged Warren and other individuals to “constructively participate” in the issue of financial independence and innovation with its community.
This comes only a day after Erik Vorhees, the CEO of ShapeShift, took to his personal Twitter account on February 18 and stated that he is looking forward to “submitting a proposal” to the Shapeshift DAO governance process in response to Elizabeth Warren’s criticism of the platform. Vorhees made this statement in response to Warren’s criticism of the platform.
Warren has been an outspoken critic of cryptocurrencies in recent months. He said in an interview on January 25 that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should “double down” on its attempts to regulate cryptocurrencies since the sector is nervous about what lies ahead.
She said that the previous administration of the SEC “basically gave the green light” to set up a market for cryptocurrencies that was “full of garbage tokens, unregistered securities, rug pulls, Ponzi schemes, pump and dumps, money laundering, and sanctions evasions.”
