If you’ve been following the headlines lately, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that the fight over stablecoin yields is the only sticking point holding the United States to long-awaited market structure legislation. But sadly, you would be wrong.
For months now, the headlines have been fixed on a genuine but ultimately fixable disagreement: whether crypto platforms should be allowed to share the yield from Treasury bill reserves with stablecoin holders, or whether that practice should be limited to protect traditional banks from competition for consumer deposits. It’s a real battle. The American Bankers Association has assembled all its weapons against it. Coinbase has redlined it. Senate negotiators spent months trying to find the needle. And they will probably find you eventually.
But while banking lobbyists and the media are preoccupied with who exactly will get the right to collect stablecoin interest, Congress is getting dangerously close to issuing a single fine that will determine whether the market structure truly lives up to its promise — or end up crippling the very industry it claims to support. That provision — Section 604 of the current Senate draft — relates to developer protections and how those who write non-security software can be held liable by the USG as actual 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 is not an abstract philosophical argument. It is the load-bearing wall that supports the entire policy objective of this bill. And right now, it’s cracking.
BRCA Is All Football
The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, or BRCA, is a piecemeal provision with bipartisan origins. Introduced by Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), it does one important thing: it clarifies that software developers and infrastructure providers who do not store or manage user funds are not money transmitters under federal law. That’s all. It does not weaken anti-money laundering laws. It does not protect against bad actors. It just draws a line that should have been obvious from the start – that writing code is not the same as transferring money.
Without the BRCA, developers of proprietary software — the people who create the wallets, protocols, and decentralized applications that millions of Americans already use — face potential criminal charges under Section 1960 of the federal criminal code. Not civil penalties. They are not regulatory penalties. Criminal prosecution for the mere act of publishing software.
This is not a theory. We have already seen what “prosecution regulations” look like. In 2025, the developers of Tornado Cash and Samurai Wallet were prosecuted for crimes – not for money laundering, not for conspiring with criminals, but for writing and publishing codes that other people used in ways the government didn’t like. Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill are now in prison serving federal sentences following their convictions in what is often seen as a racketeering case. Roman Storm was also prosecuted and faces over a hundred years in prison. And all this despite the position of the DOJ directive to the contrary, the Treasury department that admits the legitimate need for privacy / hybrids, and the management that they say is “the most crypto-friendly” in history. No matter what shade of lipstick you want to put it on, the message from federal prosecutors is unmistakable: if you build illegal software in the United States, you do so at your own risk.
If the Senate CLARITY Act passes without strong BRCA protections, that message becomes the law of the land. And the logical response from every developer, every startup, and every business-backed crypto company in America would be the same: leave.
This is not an exaggeration. It is an economic certainty. No inventor with competent legal counsel will accept a regulatory framework where writing open source code can land you in state prison based on which way the wind blows in Washington DC. A CLARITY ACT without the strong protection of the BRCA developer, will simply fail to deliver clarity. It will accelerate the very flight that Congress says it is trying to stop.
Congress can kill the economy of its Agentic in Crib
The developer exodus can be catastrophic enough in itself. But the timing here could not be worse because Congress could end up choking off a new technological revolution that has the potential to generate significant GDP growth for decades to come: the agency economy.
Autonomous AI agents – software systems that can interact, perform, and execute tasks on behalf of users without the need for human intervention – are emerging as the next major computing paradigm. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang outlined a $1 trillion agent AI opportunity at GTC 2026. OpenAI builds models designed for multi-agent architectures. Institutional funds are flooded. And the infrastructure these agents need to operate at a certain scale – micropayments, 24/7 settlement, programmable wallets, cryptographic verification – are all built using blockchains.
This is not a crypto-native fever dream. It is the consensus view of the world’s largest technology companies and investors. AI agents need a permissionless, always-on financial channel. Traditional payment systems, with their fees, minimum fees, and business hour limits, cannot support an economy where machines operate thousands of times per second. Blockchains can. And the developers building that nascent infrastructure are the same developers the CLARITY Act threatens to criminalize and drive them offshore.
We’ve been here before. In the late 1990s, Congress grappled with a similar point of early Internet use. Lawmakers could impose tough rules on the nascent web — requiring licenses for website operators, placing liability on platform developers for user-generated content, taxing digital transactions before the market has had a chance to mature. They choose to hold back. That decision — deliberate, bipartisan, and far-sighted — enabled the creation of the most important engine of economic value in modern history. Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla — billions of dollars in publicly traded equity, millions of American jobs, and an entire generation of global tech leaders — all trace their origins to a Congress that understood that overzealous regulation kills innovation.
The agent economy is the rising internet of the 2020s. The question is whether this Congress will show the same prudence — or whether it will overauthorize transformative technology as it matures, leaving what should be a new generation of American economic dominance in competitive environments that won’t make the same mistake.
Violation of Tool Manufacturer’s Policy
Even if we set aside the economic disaster that will follow any legalization of crypto/AI software development, the government’s current approach to developer liability – which will be forever guaranteed by the CLARITY Act without the strong protections of BRCA – represents something far more important: a violation of the basic principles of American law.
We don’t prosecute motorists like bank robbers because the driver was driving a Ford. We are not charging Google developers with conspiracy because hackers coordinated the Gmail attack. We don’t blame Microsoft engineers for money laundering because the company tracks its finances using Excel. In all other domains in American commerce, we recognize a basic legal principle: the maker of an instrument is not liable for misuse.
Crypto developers can class only of the tool makers in the American economy are singled out for this retaliatory treatment. And the tool they’re building — open-source, open-source software that empowers people to do things without intermediaries — is arguably more in line with the American values of individual freedom, financial privacy, and free enterprise than any technology since the printing press.
This is not a group opinion. BRCA was introduced jointly by Republicans and Democrats. It passed the House of Representatives by 70%. The principle it embodies – that publishing code is not a crime – should be as uncontroversial as the principle that publishing a newspaper is not a crime. Yet here we are, watching the Congress that promised to make America the crypto capital of the world negotiate one provision that will make that happen.
What Congress Needs to Hear
Making America the crypto capital of the world was the main promise of the current administration and the congressional majority that came into office next to it. Voters heard that promise. The industry heard it. The world heard. The CLARITY Act, without the developer’s bulletproof protections, would fall far short of that promise.
The stablecoin harvest battle will be resolved. No one wants to see the digital yuan win because bankers need the gravy train to keep rolling on Wall Street. Regulatory competition between the SEC and CFTC will be resolved. A new Howey frame will be built. These are all important details, but ultimately they are just that – implementation details. The question at hand — the one that determines whether there will be an American crypto industry left to regulate in 2030 — is whether Congress will protect the developers who build this technology from criminal prosecution through the act of writing code.
The BRCA should be included in any market structure bill. Must be equipped with teeth. And it should not be diluted, carved, or sold in classroom discussions about provisions, however important, that are not the difference between a thriving industry in America and one packing its bags for Hong Kong or Singapore.
Congress has a very narrow window of opportunity left. The mid-term elections in November look poised for a political earthquake. The legislative timer in Washington DC is quickly running out of sand. The productive opportunity for the United States to assert its continued leadership in the new multi-polar world order is disappearing. The time to get this right is now – not because the crypto lobby wants it, but because American principles of innovation, equal treatment under the law, and our continued global economic and technological leadership demand it.
The question is not whether the United States will foot the bill for market structure. The question is whether that bill will be 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 reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
