Lummis-Gillibrand is a blessing for the crypto industry

There’s never a good time for a crypto winter, but it would be difficult to envision a worse time than right now.

Even before 70% of Bitcoin’s (BTC) value evaporated seemingly overnight, things were not going great in the court of public opinion. Negative sentiment was everywhere; a Twitter account documenting crypto bros taking it on the chin racked up hundreds of thousands of followers. Now the biggest crypto exchanges in the world are laying off full-time employees by the thousands, and the self-proclaimed “Cryptoqueen” has landed a spot on the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for defrauding investors out of $4 billion. Oof. The prosecution rests.

It’s easy to brush off crypto’s public-facing PR woes as being exactly that: an image problem. Looks aren’t everything. This is the domain of diamond hands, not useless hand-wringing. Leave the non-believers behind. We were never going to convince the hardcore detractors and incorrigible skeptics anyway. (The problem with this mindset, however reassuring its devil-may-care optimism, is that it always ends up advocating preaching to the choir as a viable strategy. It isn’t. It never has been.)

A faceless hoard of hardcore detractors and incorrigible skeptics have proven useful straw men since crypto’s early days. But upon closer examination and in the wake of the crash, the skeptics eager to bring us to heel are real people with real power, and they were watching us closely before that line went down, down, down.

Related: Sen. Lummis: My proposal with Sen. Gillibrand empowers the SEC to protect consumers

This is happening on both sides of the Atlantic. In Washington, skepticism over crypto is increasingly the norm. Last September, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler compared stablecoins to “poker chips” and emphasized the need for Congress to increase its regulatory powers over crypto. Co-sponsored by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D) and Cynthia Lummis (R), an expansive regulatory bill called the Responsible Financial Innovation Act arrived on June 7, removed from the industry-shaking dip by days, not months. Another bipartisan proposal — led by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D) and John Boozman (R) — arrived in August.

From downturns to crackdowns

This bill is no symbolic gesture. It enjoys bipartisan support, for one thing, in a government where bipartisan support of anything is just about unheard of in recent years. The…