Sen. Elizabeth Warren has asked federal law-enforcement and national-security officials to open a new probe into a slice of the crypto world — this time naming PancakeSwap, the popular decentralized exchange that runs across multiple blockchains and is a major protocol on Binance’s chain. In a letter sent Monday to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Pam Bondi, Warren flagged concerns that PancakeSwap may have been used to amplify coins issued by World Liberty Financial Inc. (WLFI), which she says has ties to former President Donald Trump. Warren asked the agencies to investigate “any improper political influence by the Trump Administration on enforcement decisions,” repeating concerns she raised last month about WLFI. Warren — the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, which must sign off on any market-structure crypto bill — framed the request in the context of broader regulatory work. “As Congress considers crypto market structure legislation — including rules to prevent terrorists, criminals, and rogue states from exploiting decentralized finance (DeFi) to fund their activities — it is critical to understand whether you are seriously investigating these risks,” she wrote. Her move underscores two converging flashpoints in DC: worries about DeFi’s anonymity and scale, and partisan tensions around how and whether senior officials should be allowed to keep business interests in crypto. Warren criticized DeFi platforms for “facilitating hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions per day” without requiring user registration or ID — a core regulatory concern that remains a major sticking point in negotiations over the market-structure bill. Industry players have called DeFi treatment a red-line issue that could determine whether the sector backs final legislation. Warren has been largely sidelined so far in the bipartisan talks: a bloc of Senate Democrats agreed to negotiate with Republicans on the bill, and those talks failed to yield action before year-end. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott has said the panel will resume work on the legislation in January. Meanwhile, Democrats’ push to bar senior government officials from holding crypto business interests has met resistance from the White House, which has rejected some of those proposals and maintained that the president’s crypto ties do not amount to a conflict of interest. That political friction could complicate progress next month. If negotiations extend beyond the opening weeks of the year, they risk colliding with Congress’ budget fights that culminate around a Jan. 30 deadline — a standoff that in the past has delayed legislation and even prompted a partial government shutdown. Warren’s letter spotlights the growing overlap between national-security scrutiny and crypto policy-making: regulators and lawmakers are being pressed to weigh enforcement and political-ethics questions even as they try to settle technical, market-structure rules that will shape the future of DeFi and centralized crypto markets. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news