Tech titan Meta (META) has reportedly been looking into the possibility of a return to the stablecoin market after having spurred a U.S. regulatory backlash from its efforts in years past, and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren told CoinDesk that the pending legislation to govern stablecoins needs to insist that’s not possible.

A high-stakes crypto bill to set up U.S. rules for stablecoins such as Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC was virtually sailing through the Senate until Democrats — including some who had supported the effort in committee — rose against it in recent days and halted the bill’s progress on the Senate floor this week. The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act needs to change to prevent the large corporations from issuing their own money, Warren said.

«The Senate must fix the GENIUS Act so it prohibits Big Tech companies and other commercial giants from owning or affiliating with stablecoin companies,» the Massachusetts Democrat said in a statement to CoinDesk. «No Senator should vote to make it easier for Big Tech to pry into our financial transactions or choke off small businesses and political adversaries from the payments system.»

Six years ago, Meta sought to launch its own crypto stablecoin, Libra (later called Diem), and nearly made it to the finish line before an uproar from certain regulators and lawmakers derailed the project. She argued that Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, whose company gave $1 million to President Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, is trying to get back into the business, and she called for Zuckerberg «to explain to Congress if this is another attempt to control the American people’s money.»

Meta’s spokespeople didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Warren’s views.

The GENIUS Act is now back in negotiations, and some lawmakers remained hopeful it could reappear on the Senate floor as early as next week. There’s also a House of Representatives version similarly winding its way through the process in that chamber of Congress.

Binance and the Treasury

Warren, the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee has been busy with her crypto-sector scrutiny, also joining in with colleagues on Friday to question Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Pam Bondi on their interactions with Binance as it reportedly sought to smooth out the U.S. legal demands the exchange still labors under after a 2023 settlement.

Five DemocratIc senators — also including Richard Blumenthal, Chris Van Hollen, Mazie Horono and Sheldon Whitehouse — sent a letter to the officials about the exchange’s discussions with the U.S. government as Binance increases business ties with World Liberty Financial, the crypto company tied to President Donald Trump and his family.

«As the administration loosens oversight on an industry where bad actors have violated money laundering and sanctions law, it is not surprising that Binance, which has admitted to prioritizing its own growth and profits over compliance with U.S. law, would seek to roll back the oversight required by its settlement,» they wrote in the letter, noting Binance’s constraints based on its past guilty pleas to a list of charges including money laundering and sanctions violations, for which the company is still under the observation of independent monitors. 

«Our concerns about Binance’s compliance obligations are even more pressing given recent reports that the company is using the Trump family’s stablecoin to partner with foreign investment companies,» the senators said.

Spokespeople for Binance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read More: Trump’s Crypto Play Fuels Senators’ Backlash and Bill to Ban President Memecoins

Nikhilesh De contributed reporting.

Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings (MARA) stock outperformed peers on Friday, even after its first quarter results missed Wall Street’s estimates, as the company’s focus on lowering costs is seen as positive by analysts.

Jefferies analysts said that with the bitcoin BTC price improving in the second quarter of this year and MARA focusing on more sustainable energy sources such as solar and flared gas-driven data centers, power costs should come down in the coming quarters and help margins.

«MARA is expanding infrastructure at its 114 MW wind farm and has fully energized its 25 MW micro flared gas data center, both of which should drive down power costs,» said analyst Jonathan Petersen in a note.

If the mining firm continues to buy up more of such power sources, it would help the company’s profitability, Petersen wrote. «Continued acquisition of power assets is expected to further reduce energy costs, expand margins, and better prepare the firm for the next halving.» Peterson reiterated his hold rating on the stock, while raising the price target to $16 from $13.

Bitcoin mining, once a very profitable business, has seen its profit margins crash drastically during the last bear market and even more so after the recent halving that cut the rewards by half. To make matters worse, rising power costs for mining have continued to plague the margins.

This squeeze has forced most miners to diversify their business into other sources of revenue, including hosting artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) data centers. MARA was among the few miners that didn’t jump into the AI sector right away, but rather focused on other avenues of diversification, such as transaction revenue services, mining pool, buying bitcoin in the open market and lowering power costs via green energy sources.

The last point about lower power cost seemed to have struck a chord with the market.

H.C. Wainwright analyst Kevin Dede said that this is what separates MARA from its mining peers: «Commentary last night made it clear the company remains focused on technology development in its core vertical of power conversion … with a peeled eye on driving energy costs to zero.»

«We rehash this here in distancing MARA’s strategy against mining competitors gently or forcefully migrating their mining businesses to address the rapidly evolving HPC opportunity,» he said.

Dede, who has a buy rating and price target of $28, also seemed to echo the sentiment that MARA will be able to lower costs by focusing on these types of power sources.

«Our opinion on that aside for now, we agree with MARA’s overarching objective to create opportunities by exploiting unused power or improving the efficiency of used power,» he said.

MARA’s shares rose as much as 9% on Friday, while the CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI) has fallen about 0.3%.

Read more: MARA Holdings Cut to Sell at Compass Point Ahead of Earnings, Citing Cash Burn

U.S. President Donald Trump has come a long way since he said the value of crypto was “based on thin air” in 2019. So much so that he is now one of the sector’s largest proponents, foraying into memecoins, DeFi, NFTs, and even stablecoins.

A new report by the State Democracy Defenders Fund estimates that Trump’s family has increased their net worth by $2.9 billion thanks to crypto, and that now 40% of that net worth is being held in crypto assets.

His deepening ties to the industry have reverberated across the political landscape, to the point that a broadly bipartisan stablecoin bill failed in a key vote Thursday after Democrats expressed concern about the extent to which he is profiting off the sector.

Trump’s support helped spark a continued bull market after his election victory in November, a market that’s been dominated by two trends: memecoins and institutional adoption of bitcoin via ETFs. While the latter is the province of, generally, institutional investors and providers, it’s the memecoin business that puts retail investors at risk and is potentially ripe for exploitation.

On Thursday, Solidus Labs claimed that 98% of memecoins issued on the token creation platform pump.fun were rug pulls or pump-and-dump schemes. The platform has since refuted the report’s claims.

Another analysis by Chainalysis, cited by CNBC, suggested that the vast majority of TRUMP token holders lost money.

A memecoin is a type of crypto token with no inherent value, often based, as the name suggests, on a meme or cartoon character. Popular examples of this are dogecoin (DOGE), shiba inu (SHIB) and pepe (PEPE). The craze reached a climax in January when Trump touted his own TRUMP token on social media, followed by MELANIA— named after his wife.

TRUMP, which hit a day-one peak of $77.26, is now trading at $10.80, down a whopping 86%. MELANIA slumped even further, losing more than 97% of its value in four months to trade recently at 33 cents.

The hype around Trump’s social media post led to a flurry of trading activity. Data from Chainalysis reveals that 760,000 wallets, mainly belonging to retail investors, lost money on the TRUMP token.

A small group of people, however, was immune to those losses. The Chainanalysis data show 58 wallets made profits in excess of $10 million. The token’s creators netted a whopping $320 million in trading fees, although it’s worth noting that around 5% of the fees went to the decentralized exchange Meteora, which hosted the launch.

MELANIA was allegedly scooped up by a group of insiders before it was advertised on social media in a technique known as “sniping.” This group of insiders made $100 million on MELANIA tokens by swapping tokens for USDC after its price doubled, according to an investigation by the Financial Times.

One insider with access to the tokens before they went live was Kelsier Ventures’ Hayden Davis, who revealed his involvement during an interview in February. Davis was also the brains behind the botched LIBRA stablecoin that brought political chaos to Argentina.

In an interview with Coffeezilla in February, Davis said: “This is going to put me in a lot of danger. Which is fine, I’ll answer. I was a part of it [MELANIA]. I think the team did want to snipe it because of how big the snipe was on TRUMP. We definitely weren’t the big sniper, that was what we were trying to avoid. We didn’t take any liquidity out, zero.”

Trump’s crypto network

Trump’s foray into crypto isn’t limited to memecoins.

The U.S. president’s family is also behind World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that raised around $590 million across two pre-sale rounds earlier this year. It raised funds at a time when the market was resting around all-time highs, so that figure of raised crypto is now much less. Arkham Intelligence data suggests that World Liberty Financial holds around $103 million worth of crypto.

Trump also attempted to ride the coattails of non-fungible token (NFT) hype in 2022, releasing a series of cartoons depicting the president as a superhero or a cartoon character. Trump made around $8 million from rolling out these NFTs, according to financial disclosures.

Most recently, there was the crypto dinner event, which saw Trump host a group of 25 TRUMP holders to a private dinner and tour of his Virginia golf club. A Bloomberg report reveals that 19 of those 25 holders were either foreign entities or used an offshore exchange banned in the U.S.

He’s set to host another dinner for the top 220 holders of his token later in May. U.S. Senators Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass. called for Trump’s impeachment, asking the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate whether Trump violated federal ethics rules by inviting top investors.

The Trump family did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

Read more: Donald Trump Denies Claims of Profiting From TRUMP Token