If America wants to lead in crypto, it must protect the people who build it

The rest of the Clarity Act depends on that guarantee, because there is no digital asset market to regulate if the people who build it cannot afford to build it in the U.S. The provision survived the committee markup intact, despite a filed amendment that would have gutted it, and it must stay in through the final vote, fully and without dilution.

Here is why this matters to people who will never read a word of the statute. The engineers who write this software, from core Solana contributors to the designers of new DeFi protocols, publish code that anyone in the world can download and use. They hold no money. They cannot freeze an account or move funds, because they never touch them. Treating a software developer like a bank teller makes about as much sense as calling an email app’s engineer a mail carrier. Treasury’s 2019 FinCEN guidance already recognized that merely providing software or network tools used by money transmitters does not, by itself, make someone a money transmitter. The BRCA aligns the criminal code with that standard.

When laws are murky, regulators and prosecutors fill the gap. Treasury has pursued builders who wrote and released software but never held a customer’s assets. The conviction of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm for conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business is the case people know, and it fits a pattern that should worry anyone who cares about American innovation. Cases like it are already pushing developers overseas.