Catholic Leaders Fight Crypto Bill Over Trafficking Safeguards

The Alliance to End Human Trafficking has been explicit: cryptocurrencies, when poorly regulated, can become tools for moving money tied to exploitation. Law enforcement agencies across multiple countries have documented cases where trafficking operations used digital assets to receive payments and launder proceeds, precisely because early crypto transactions were harder to trace than traditional banking. The regulatory frameworks that developed over the past several years were built partly in response to those documented abuses.

The Clarity Act has not been finalized. It is still moving through the legislative process, and the outcome is genuinely uncertain. Catholic leaders and their allies in the Alliance are watching closely, waiting to see whether lawmakers respond to their concerns before the bill advances further.

No formal government response to the opposition has been made public. It is unclear whether any direct dialogue between the Alliance and the bill's sponsors has taken place. The groups say they are pushing for that conversation, hoping their advocacy leads to real revisions rather than just acknowledgment.

The broader crypto industry is watching too, for different reasons. Firms and exchanges that have been lobbying for regulatory clarity want the bill to pass more or less intact. That puts them on a collision course with advocacy groups who see the current draft as a step backward on financial crime prevention.

The Alliance's opposition probably reflects a wider unease among anti-trafficking groups about how crypto regulation has been evolving. There has been a general tension in Washington between industry-friendly deregulatory impulses and the law enforcement community's insistence that digital asset oversight cannot be hollowed out.

What happens next probably depends on whether lawmakers treat the Alliance's concerns as a serious legislative problem or a public relations issue to be managed. The Catholic leaders involved seem prepared to keep pressing either way.

The Alliance to End Human Trafficking's position has not shifted: without meaningful amendments, the Clarity Act creates risk it cannot accept.