If you’ve been following the headlines lately, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that the struggle over stablecoin returns is the only sticking point preventing the United States from long-awaited comprehensive market structure regulation in the cryptocurrency industry. But unfortunately, you would be wrong.
For months, headlines have focused on a real but ultimately resolvable disagreement: whether crypto platforms should be allowed to share the yield from their Treasury 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 has mobilized its entire arsenal of lobbyists against this idea. Coinbase has redlined. Senate negotiators have spent months trying to resolve the problem. Maybe they’ll figure it out eventually.
But while banking lobbyists and the media obsess over who will get the privilege of earning stablecoin interest, Congress is dangerously close to eliminating the one provision that will determine whether the market structure actually delivers on its promises — or will end up crippling the very industry it claims to support. This provision – Section 604 of the current Senate draft – concerns developer protections and whether those who write non-custodial software can be held accountable to the US government as bona fide senders of funds. Whether this section survives the Senate negotiating process unchanged will determine the fate of the entire bill.
This provision is not a technical footnote. It is not an abstract philosophical discussion. It is the load-bearing wall that supports the whole political objective of this bill. And now, it’s cracked.
The BRCA is the whole ball game
the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Lawor BRCA, is a narrowly tailored provision with partisan origins. Introduced by Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), it does one basic thing: It makes clear that software developers and infrastructure providers that do not hold or control user funds are not money carriers under federal law. That’s it. It does not weaken anti-money laundering laws. It doesn’t protect bad actors. It simply draws a line that should have been clear from the beginning, that writing code is not the same as transferring money.
Without the BRCA, developers of non-custodial software — the people who build the wallets, protocols, and decentralized applications already used by millions of Americans — face potential criminal liability under Section 1960 of the federal criminal code. Not civil penalties and not regulatory fines. Criminal prosecution for merely publishing software.
This is not hypothetical. We have already seen what “regulation by prosecution” looks like. In 2025, the developers of Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet were criminally prosecuted — not for personally laundering money, not for actively conspiring with criminals, but for simply writing and publishing code that other people used in ways the government didn’t like. Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill are now in custody serving federal sentences after being convicted in what often seemed like a show trial. Roman Storm is retried and faces more than a century in prison. And all this despite DOJ guidance to the contrary, a Treasury Department that recognizes the legitimate need for privacy/confusing, and an administration that claims to be the “most crypto-friendly” in history. No matter what color of lipstick you want to put on it, the message from federal prosecutors is clear and unambiguous: If you build noncustodial programs in the United States, you do so at your own risk.
If the Senate CLARITY Act passes without strong BRCA protections, this letter would become the law of the land. The rational response from every developer, every startup, and every venture-backed cryptocurrency company in America would be the same: Leave.
This is not an exaggeration. It is economic certainty. No founder with competent legal counsel would accept a regulatory framework where writing open source code could land you in federal prison depending on which way the wind blows in Washington, DC. Instead, they will be incorporated in Singapore, Switzerland, or the United Arab Emirates — in any jurisdiction that doesn’t treat software engineers like unlicensed money senders. Without strong protections for BRCA developers, the Clarity Act will only fail to deliver clarity. This will accelerate the capital flight that Congress claims it is trying to prevent.
Congress could kill the agent economy in the bud
The developer exodus would be disastrous in itself. But the timing here couldn’t be worse because Congress may end up stifling the emerging technological revolution that has the potential to generate measurable GDP growth for decades to come: the proxy economy.
Autonomous AI agents—software systems that can negotiate, transact, and perform tasks on behalf of users without requiring human intervention—are emerging as the next great computing paradigm. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang predicted a $1 trillion opportunity for agentic AI at GTC 2026. OpenAI builds models specifically designed for multi-agent architectures. Institutional capital is flowing in. And the infrastructure these agents need to operate at scale — micropayments, 24/7 settlement, programmable wallets, cryptographic verification — is all built using blockchains.
This is not the original crypto fever dream. It’s a view agreed upon by the world’s largest technology companies and investors. AI agents need unauthorized and always-on financial trails. Traditional payment systems, with their batch settlements, minimal transaction fees, and business hour restrictions, cannot support an economy where machines transact with machines thousands of times per second. Blockchain can. And the developers building that emerging infrastructure are the same developers that the CLARITY Act threatens to criminalize and push out.
We’ve been here before. In the late 1990s, Congress faced a similar inflection point with the advent of the Internet. Lawmakers could have imposed strict regulations on the emerging Internet, such as requiring licenses for website operators, imposing liability on platform developers for user-generated content, and taxing digital transactions before the market had a chance to mature. They chose restraint. This decision – deliberate, bipartisan, and far-sighted – has created the most extraordinary engine of economic value in modern history. Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla – trillions of dollars in publicly traded stock, millions of American jobs, and an entire generation of global technology leadership – all trace their origins to a Congress that realized that overzealous regulation kills innovation.
The agent economy is the Internet boom of the 2020s. The question is whether this Congress will show the same wisdom — or whether it will over-legislate transformational technology in the bud, ceding what should be a new generation of American economic dominance to competing jurisdictions that will not make the same mistake.
An insult to the tool maker’s principle
Even putting aside the economic catastrophe that is sure to follow in the wake of any formal criminalization of crypto/AI software development, the government’s current approach to developer liability is – and will become – permanently based on… The law of clarity And without the strong protections of BRCA – it represents something more fundamental: a violation of the basic principles of American law.
We do not prosecute auto executives as accomplices in bank robberies because the getaway driver used a Ford. We’re not accusing Google engineers of conspiracy because the criminals coordinated an attack through Gmail. We are not accusing Microsoft engineers of money laundering because the cartel was tracking its finances using Excel. in Every other field In US commerce, we recognize a fundamental legal principle: the maker of an instrument is not liable for its misuse.
Crypto developers are Class only of instrument makers in the American economy are singled out for this penal treatment. And the tool they are building—non-custodial, open-source software that enables individuals to transact without intermediaries—is arguably more consistent with American values of individual liberty, financial privacy, and free enterprise than any other technology since the printing press.
This is not a partisan remark. BRCA was introduced jointly by a Republican and a Democrat. It was passed in the House of Representatives by a 70% majority. The principle it embodies – that publishing rules is not a crime – should be as uncontroversial as the principle that publishing a newspaper is not a crime. However, we are watching the Congress that promised to make America the crypto capital of the world negotiate the one provision that would actually make that possible.
What Congress needs to hear
Making America the cryptocurrency capital of the world has been a central promise of the current administration and the Congressional majority that came to power alongside it. Voters heard this promise. The industry heard that. The world heard it. The Clarity Act, without protecting developers, will fall disastrously short of delivering on this promise.
The conflict over stablecoin revenues will be resolved. No one wanted to see the digital yuan win because the banking lobbyists needed a gravy train to keep running through Wall Street. Regulatory competition between the SEC and CFTC will be resolved. A new Howey framework will be developed. These are all important details, but in the end they are just details – implementation details. The existential question — determining whether the US cryptocurrency industry will remain regulated in 2030 — is whether Congress will protect developers who build this technology from criminal prosecution for writing code.
BRCA should be included in any market structure bill. It should be included with the teeth. It may not be diluted, cut, or traded in behind-the-scenes negotiations over provisions that do not represent the difference, despite their importance, between an industry thriving in America and an industry packing its bags in Hong Kong or Singapore.
Congress has a very narrow window of opportunity. The midterm elections scheduled for November appear poised to be a political earthquake. The legislative timer in Washington, D.C., is quickly running out of sand. The generational opportunity for the United States to assert its continued leadership of the new multipolar world order is fading. Now is the time to get it right, not because the cryptocurrency lobby demands it, but because the principles of American innovation, equal treatment under the law, and our continued economic and technological leadership of the world demand it.
The question is not whether the United States will have a draft law on market structuring. The question is whether this bill is worth the paper it is 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.
