At first, Maple was by my side. Kirsten Gillibrand’s Labradoodle pressed herself against my legs, happily accepting scratches and offering up a stuffed animal she hoped I would tug from her mouth (I obliged). New York’s junior senator, her once-blonde hair now closer to the white of Maple’s coat, then sat down across from me in her office, ready to explain how cryptocurrency had become one of her most prominent legislative priorities.

It was not an obvious place for her to end up. Two decades ago, Gillibrand won election to the House as a right-leaning Democrat from a conservative upstate district. After her appointment to Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat three years later, she moved sharply left, emerging as a leading voice against sexual assault in the military and on college campuses. At the height of the Me Too movement, she led the charge in calling for Senator Al Franken to resign, then ran for president in 2019 as a staunch progressive, describing some of her former positions as moral failings and warning against “circles and systems of power” sustained by “corruption and greed.” Today, she is the Democratic Party’s leading champion of an industry notorious for fraud, spectacular collapses, and scams — and the eye-watering sums it spends to win the favor of politicians in both parties.

Crypto appeared on Gillibrand’s radar not long after her presidential campaign fizzled out. She said she first heard about it from constituents and financial regulators, then in hearings about cybercrime and illicit finance. “In the early stages, nobody knew anything about it. I didn’t know anything about it. So I started reading some books and listening to podcasts and trying to understand what the industry was about,” she told me.

The more she learned, she said, the more frustrated she became that lawmakers seemed content to leave it alone. “What I was seeing from Congress is that they were too unwilling and unable to learn about a new industry and actually do the basic regulation,” she added. Before running for Congress, Gillibrand spent 15 years as a securities lawyer. “I was very knowledgeable about credit default swaps when most of my colleagues didn’t even know what a credit default swap was,” she explained. “Complex commercial issues that need to be regulated are something I’m just very familiar with, and it’s not scary for me.”

In 2025, Gillibrand was the lead Democratic sponsor of the GENIUS Act, which laid down federal rules for stablecoins, or tokens designed to avoid the wild price swings of cryptocurrencies by pegging them to the U.S. dollar. Reporting at the time described her roaming the Senate floor with a binder, buttonholing skeptical Democrats, listening to their problems with the bill, and carrying their proposed changes back to Republican negotiators. Eighteen Senate Democrats, almost all of them recipients of crypto largesse, joined Republicans to pass the bill.

This year, she played much the same role for the CLARITY Act, the crypto industry’s great unfinished legislative project, pressing fellow Democrats for their votes. The sweeping bill would have moved much of digital-asset trading out of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s securities-law regime and into a new framework overseen by the chronically underfunded and much weaker Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The previous SEC had sued major trading platforms, including Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance, only for the suits to be dropped once Trump was sworn in for a second term. This was “why CLARITY was so existential for the industry,” according to Amanda Fischer, who served as chief of staff in the Biden SEC. The bill would have “codified and blessed their business structures and protected past conduct from future enforcement.”

It would also have made it easier for banks and other traditional financial firms to enter the crypto market, allowing them to trade, hold, lend against, and process payments in digital assets — an enormous step toward knitting the crypto industry into the traditional financial system. The bill appeared headed for passage until negotiations foundered over how to prevent elected officials from profiting from crypto, a newly urgent question given the Trump family’s budding crypto empire. When Republicans brought the bill to the floor without a bipartisan agreement on stronger ethics provisions, it became clear the bill would fail, and Gillibrand joined the rest of the Democratic caucus in voting “no.”

Gillibrand is not only one of crypto’s most important Democratic allies but also chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, responsible for raising money for her colleagues. According to reporting by Punchbowl News, Gillibrand’s chief of staff, Jess Fassler, invoked his boss’s fundraising position while urging other Democratic aides to help advance the GENIUS Act, according to four aides present. Some took the remark as an implicit warning about the political........

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