If you’ve been following the news headlines lately, you could be forgiven for thinking that the fight over stablecoin yields is the only sticking point holding the U.S. back from the comprehensive market structure bill that the crypto industry has been waiting for for years. But unfortunately that is wrong.
In recent months, headlines have focused on a genuine but ultimately manageable disagreement over whether crypto platforms should be allowed to share yields from Treasury bill reserves with stablecoin holders, or whether the practice should be restricted to protect traditional banks from competition for consumer deposits. It’s a real battle. The American Bankers Association responded with all its lobbying weapons. Coinbase redlined it. Senate negotiators have been trying to thread the needle for months. And they’ll probably figure it out eventually.
But while bank lobbyists and the media fixate on who exactly gets the privilege of reaping stablecoin interest, Congress is dangerously close to repealing a single provision that will determine whether the market structure actually delivers on its promise, or whether it will ultimately devastate the very industry it claims to support. This provision (Section 604 in the current Senate draft) concerns developer protections and whether those who create non-custodial software can be held liable by the USG as bona fide money transmitters. Whether this section survives the Senate negotiation process will determine the fate of the entire bill.
This provision is not a technical footnote. It’s not an abstract philosophical discussion. Load-bearing walls underpin the entire policy objective of this bill. And now it’s cracking.
BRCA is the whole ball game
The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) is a narrowly tailored provision with bipartisan origins. The bill, introduced by Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), accomplishes one important thing. It would clarify that software developers and infrastructure providers who do not store or manage users’ funds are not money transmitters under federal law. that’s it. It does not weaken anti-money laundering laws. It doesn’t protect bad guys. This just draws the line that should have been obvious all along: writing code and transferring money are not the same.
Without BRCA, developers of non-custodial software—those who build the wallets, protocols, and decentralized applications already used by millions of Americans—could face criminal charges under Section 1960 of the Federal Criminal Code. It’s not a civil penalty. It is not a regulatory fine. The mere act of disclosing software can lead to criminal prosecution.
This is not a hypothesis. We have already seen what “prosecutorial regulation” is. In 2025, the developers of Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet were criminally prosecuted. He was not charged with personally laundering money or actively colluding with criminals, but merely with writing and publishing code for others to use in ways the government didn’t like. Kionne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill are currently serving federal sentences after being each convicted in what appeared to be a show trial. Roman Storm has been re-indicted and faces more than 100 years in prison. And all this despite guidance to the contrary from the Department of Justice, a Treasury Department that acknowledges the legitimate need for privacy/mixers, and a government that claims to be the “most crypto-friendly” in history. No matter what lipstick you choose to wear, the message from federal prosecutors is unmistakable. If you build non-custodial software in the United States, you do so at your own risk.
If the Senate CLARITY Act passes without strong BRCA protections, that message will become the law of the land. And the rational response for every developer, every startup, and venture-backed crypto company in America would be the same: exit.
This is not an exaggeration. It’s economic certainty. No founder with a good lawyer would accept a regulatory framework where writing open source code could land him in federal prison depending on which way the wind blows in Washington, D.C. Instead, they will set up legal entities in Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates, jurisdictions that do not treat software engineers like unlicensed money transfer agents. A CLARITY Act without strong BRCA developer protections not only fails to provide clarity; That would accelerate the very capital flight that Congress claims to prevent.
Congress could kill the agent economy in its crib
An exodus of developers would be catastrophic enough on its own. But the timing here couldn’t be worse, as Congress is very likely to strangle a nascent technological revolution, the agent economy, that has the potential to generate real GDP growth for decades to come.
Autonomous AI agents—software systems that can negotiate, process, and perform tasks on your behalf without the need for human intervention—are emerging as the next great computing paradigm. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang predicted a $1 trillion agent AI opportunity at GTC 2026. OpenAI builds models designed for multi-agent architectures. Institutional investors are flooding in. And the infrastructure these agencies need to operate at scale (micropayments, 24/7 payments, programmable wallets, crypto verification) is all built using blockchain.
This is not a crypto native’s fever dream. This is a common view among the world’s largest technology companies and investors. AI agents require permissionless, always-on financial rails. Traditional payment systems cannot support an economy where machines make thousands of transactions per second due to batch payments, minimum transaction fees, and limited business hours. With blockchain, that is possible. And the developers building that nascent infrastructure are the same developers the CLARITY Act threatens to criminalize and send out of the country.
We’ve been here before. In the late 1990s, Congress faced a tipping point similar to the early Internet. Lawmakers could have imposed stronger regulations on the early web before the market matured, requiring licenses from website operators, holding platform developers accountable for user-generated content, and taxing digital transactions. They chose restraint. This decision was intentional, bipartisan, and visionary, and enabled the creation of the most extraordinary economic value engine in modern history. Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla—trillions of dollars in publicly traded stock, millions of American jobs, and an entire generation of global technological leadership—all trace their origins to a Congress that understood that overregulation kills innovation.
The agent economy is the internet boom of the 2020s. The question is whether this Congress will show similar wisdom or over-legislate early-stage innovative technologies, ceding a new generation of American economic advantage to competing jurisdictions that do not make the same mistakes.
an affront to the principles of the toolmaker;
Even putting aside the economic disaster that is certain to follow the public criminalization of crypto/AI software development, the government’s current approach to developer liability, permanently anchored by the CLARITY Act without strong BRCA protections, represents a violation of something more fundamental: a fundamental principle of American law.
Because the getaway driver was using a Ford, the auto company executive will not be charged with aiding and abetting the bank robbery. Google engineers will not be charged with conspiracy because criminals orchestrated an attack on Gmail. Microsoft engineers will not be charged with money laundering because the cartel used Excel to track its finances. In all other areas of American commerce, we recognize fundamental legal principles. That is, the tool manufacturer is not responsible for its misuse.
Cryptocurrency developers are the only tool makers in the American economy singled out for this retaliatory treatment. And the tools they are building—uncontrolled, open-source software that allows individuals to transact without intermediaries—are perhaps more aligned with American values of personal liberty, economic privacy, and free enterprise than any technology since the printing press.
This is not a partisan view. BRCA was jointly introduced by Republicans and Democrats. It passed in the House of Representatives with a 70% majority. The principle it embodies, that the publication of a code is not a crime, should be as uncontroversial as the principle that the publication of a newspaper is not a crime. But here we are watching Congress, which promised to make America the crypto capital of the world, negotiate away the only provision that would actually make it possible.
What Congress Needs to Hear
Making America the crypto capital of the world has been a central promise of the current administration and the Congressional majority that came into office with it. Voters heard that promise. The industry heard it. The world heard it. The CLARITY Act would fall woefully short of delivering on its promise without bulletproof protections for developers.
The dispute over stablecoin yields will be resolved. No one wants to see the digital renminbi win because the bank lobbyists needed a gravy train to keep rolling down Wall Street. The regulatory competition between the SEC and CFTC will be resolved. A new Howey framework will be developed. These are all important details, but ultimately they are just implementation details. The existential question that will determine whether the U.S. cryptocurrency industry becomes regulated by 2030 is whether Congress protects the developers who build this technology from criminal prosecution for the act of writing the code.
BRCA must be included in market structure legislation. It must be contained in the tooth. And no matter how important, it must not be diluted, cut out, or replaced in backroom negotiations over provisions that are not the difference between an industry that thrives in America and an industry that packs its bags for Hong Kong or Singapore.
Congress has very few opportunities left. The midterm elections in November are likely to be a political shock. Washington DC’s legislative timer is rapidly running out of sand. The generational opportunity for the United States to assert continued leadership in the new multipolar world order is disappearing. It’s time to get this right. Not because the crypto lobby demands it, but because America’s principles of innovation, equal treatment under the law, and continued economic and technological leadership in the world demand it.
The issue is not whether the US will formulate a market structure bill. The question is whether the bill is worth the paper it’s printed on.
This is a guest post by Kyle Olney. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
