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 can’t afford to build it in the U.S. The provision survived intact outside of committee, despite a proposed amendment that would have destroyed it, and must remain until the final vote, in its entirety and without dilution.
Here’s why this is important for people who will never read a word of the statute. The engineers who write this software, from Solana’s top contributors to designers of new DeFi protocols, publish code that anyone in the world can download and use. They don’t have money. They can’t freeze an account or move funds because they never touch them. Treating a software developer like a bank teller makes as much sense as calling an email application engineer a postman. Treasury’s 2019 FinCEN guidance already recognized that simply providing software or networking tools used by money transmitters does not, by itself, make someone a money transmitter. The BRCA aligns the criminal code with that standard.
When the laws are murky, regulators and prosecutors fill the void. The Treasury has gone after 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 transmission business is a case that people know about and fits a pattern that should worry anyone who cares about American innovation. Cases like this are already pushing developers abroad.
