According to BlockBeats, on September 11, Cointelegraph reported that on September 10, the U.S. Congress held its first hearing on decentralized finance (DeFi), and Republican and Democratic lawmakers showed obvious differences on this issue. The hearing was hosted by the House Financial Services Committee and the theme was “Decoding DeFi: Analyzing the Future of Decentralized Finance”, aiming to explore emerging topics such as tokenization and the application of blockchain in the financial field.
Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman was highly critical, saying that DeFi is mainly used for crime, evasion of sanctions, and tax evasion. Democratic Representative Maxine Waters mentioned the incident in which Laura and Tiffany Trump’s X account was hacked and used to promote scam tokens related to the Trump family DeFi project “World Liberty Financial”. She questioned whether regulators such as the SEC and CFTC are capable of dealing with DeFi platforms and “massive non-compliance by entities claiming to be decentralized to evade regulation.” In contrast, Amanda Tuminelli, chief legal officer of the DeFi Education Fund, emphasized the openness and inclusiveness of DeFi.
The two-and-a-half-hour hearing highlighted the deep divisions among U.S. lawmakers on DeFi technology and the challenges facing regulators. Crypto lawyer Jake Chervinsky commented on social media: “A few years ago, there were only ten DeFi projects and no one thought there would be any achievements. Now it is on full display in the halls of power in Washington.”
