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This week, the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs subcommittee on Digital Assets hosted a hearing about the possibility of cryptocurrency legislation.

My primary takeaway after surviving this hearing is that it's unlikely any cryptocurrency legislation gets passed by this Congress.

However, despite the formulaic atmosphere of the hearing, there was at least one moment I found hilarious.

What to expect from today's Senate digital assets hearing

Near the end of the hearing, Senator Van Hollen asked the panel of witnesses about Trump's memecoin, and specifically if they thought it was problematic or represented a conflict of interest.

The responses were illuminating, especially because of the unintentionally comedic order in which they came:

Timothy Massad described the token as "blatant corruption."
Jai Massari wanted to focus on memecoins broadly instead of TRUMP specifically and called them a "black eye" on the industry.
Jonathan Jachym, who works for Kraken, then explained that most of Kraken's assets are not even memecoins, and also claimed it does extensive due diligence on every memecoin it lists.
Lewis Cohen, a lawyer, noted that cryptocurrencies are an "open technology" and that means people will do with it what they will.

It was very striking, and not very surprising, that only one witness was willing to condemn the obvious conflicts of interest as "corruption."

The rest, for some reason, seem to have decided they were unwilling to criticize this obviously problematic venture from the president who claims to be a king, and who has his interim DC attorney threaten critics.

Anyway, Kraken has listed the $TRUMP token, and Kraken's co-founder is a Trump donor.

— Bennett Tomlin