Senator Richard Shelby happens to be the only senator in the parliament that is against the pro-crypto amendment to the proposed infrastructure bill in the Senate yesterday. The essence of the amendment is to redefine a broker. The previous definition somehow is quite broad that it can be applied to Proof-of-Stake Validators, Proof-of-Work miners, and even protocol developers.

In a bid to redefine a broker and exempt the non-custodial parties, several senators reached a consensus after days of consistent deliberations. For the amendment to be effective, there has to be a unanimous agreement in the senate, but it stands, only one senator will stall the progress of the amendment.

At the moment when the call to vote was made, the progress was stalled by just a vote as the 87-year-old senator, Senator Richard Shelby from Alabama, refuse to support the amendment. As it stands, the bill has gone back to its default language, and the final voting exercise will be carried out today.

Diverse reputable figures have unveiled their speculations that the reason why Shelby held down the amendment is that the amendment he proposed earlier was not voted in. The amendment from Shelby is about including a $50 billion expenditure for defense to the infrastructure bill but was not supported by Bernie Sanders.

The founder of Compound Finance, Robert Leshner, wrote on his Twitter and called the move from Senator Richard Shelby “disgusting.”

Some other persons did not attach Shelby’s rejection to the $50 billion defense amendment fall-through but rather has a thing or two to do with support from a financial backing who considered DeFi and Crypto at large as a threat to their industry and sector.

A hypothesis from the founder of Messari, a crypto research firm, Ryan Selkis, declared that Shelby has an interest in grafting one of his staff into lucrative jobs on Wall Street, considering that his retirement is near.

On the list of Shelby’s donors are contractors in the defense industry like Boeing and Lockhead, including known players in the finance sector like MetLife and Citadel.

Shelby is known majorly for his political career and has been representing Alabama since 1986 in the senate.

It was quite an unusual move to have rejected such a pro-crypto amendment considering his record of backing moves like tax cuts, financial privacy, which is a core and basis of crypto technology. Speaking in retrospect to the bill in 2010, Shelby noted that it is a violation of privacy rights to request some financial information, but after the vote yesterday, the financial privacy attached to the crypto space is not his concern.