If you’ve been following the headlines lately, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that the fight against stablecoin yields is the only area holding the United States back from long-awaited market regulation. But sadly, you would be wrong.
For months now, the headlines have been focused on real disagreements but in the end: whether crypto platforms should be allowed to share the yield from their Treasury Bill reserves with stablecoin owners, or if this practice should be prohibited to protect traditional banks from competition for consumer deposits. It’s a real fight. The American Bankers Association has assembled all of its lobbying tools to combat it. Coinbase has created a red line. Senate negotiators have spent months trying to thread the needle. And maybe they will figure it out eventually.
But even as lobbyists and the media grapple with who exactly will get access to stablecoin interest, Congress is getting dangerously close to gutting the one area that will determine whether the market actually lives up to its promises — or risk disrupting the very business it claims to support. This provision – Section 604 of the Senate bill – deals with the protection of developers and whether those who write unregistered software can be held liable by the USG as real money transmitters. Whether this section survives the Senate debate will determine the fate of the bill as a whole.
This is not technically a footnote. It is not another philosophical debate. It is a load-bearing wall that serves the overall purpose of this bill. And right now, it’s breaking.
BRCA Is All Football
The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Actor BRCA, is a partially programmed cell with a bi-state origin. Introduced by Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), it does one important thing: it makes it clear that software developers and infrastructure providers who do not store or manage users’ money are not money transmitters under federal law. That’s right. It does not weaken anti-money laundering laws. It does not prevent bad actors. It just draws a line that should have been obvious from the start – that coding is not the same as sending money.
Without BRCA, developers of unsecured software — the people who build the wallets, protocols, and software that millions of Americans already use — face a potential lawsuit under Section 1960 of the federal criminal code. Not criminal penalties. Not an administrative fee. Being sued for just publishing software.
This is not a fantasy. We have already seen what “case management” looks like. In 2025, the founders of Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet were prosecuted – not for money laundering, not for conspiring with criminals, but simply for writing and publishing codes that other people used in ways that the government did not like. Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill are now in federal prison following their acquittal in what is often seen as a show case. Roman Storm is also charged and is in prison for over a hundred years. And all this despite standing the guidance of the DOJ in contrast, the Department of the Treasury that accepts the need for a proper encryption / combination, and the administration that claims to be “crypto-friendly” in history. No matter what kind of lip service you want to put, the message from the government’s critics is clear: if you make software that isn’t stored in the United States, you do so at your own peril.
If the Senate CLARITY Act passes without strong BRCA protections, the message will become law. And the common sense response from every developer, every startup, and every crypto-backed company in America will be the same: leave.
This is not an exaggeration. It is a financial guarantee. No developer with legal advice would agree to a system where writing open source code could land you in federal prison depending on the way the wind is blowing in Washington DC. A CLARITY Act without strong protections for BRCA producers, will fail to provide clarity. It will accelerate the mass exodus that Congress says it is trying to prevent.
Congress Can Kill the Agent Economy in Its Crib
Software leaks can be very dangerous on their own. But the timing couldn’t be worse because Congress could block the technology revolution that could lead to GDP growth for decades to come: the economy of the coming years.
Autonomous AI agents – software systems that can negotiate, interact, and perform tasks on behalf of users without the need for human intervention – are emerging as the next major computing paradigm. NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang presented the $1 trillion opportunity to support AI at GTC 2026. OpenAI is building models designed for multi-party architecture. Corporate headquarters are overflowing. And the operational tools these agents need to operate at scale – micropayments, 24/7 stability, flexible wallets, cryptographic authentication – are all built using blockchains.
This is not a crypto-native fever dream. It is the consensus opinion of the world’s largest technology companies and investors. AI agents require unlicensed, constant investment. Traditional payment methods, with their tiers, limited fees, and business time limits, cannot support an economy in which automated processes are performed thousands of times per second. Blockchains can. And those who are building the infrastructure that is about to collapse are the very ones that the CLARITY Act threatens to prosecute and drive offshore.
We have been here before. In the late 1990s, Congress faced a similar challenge to the early Internet. Lawmakers could impose burdensome regulations on the nascent Internet – requiring permissions from website users, imposing liability on platform developers for user-generated content, taxing digital assets before the market has had a chance to mature. He chose to restrain himself. That decision – deliberate, double-edged, and far-sighted – created the most amazing economic engine in modern history. Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla – billions of dollars in public sales, millions of American jobs, and a whole generation of global technology leadership – all come from a Congress that understood that strong control kills innovation.
The Economic Agency is the internet boom of the 2020s. The question is whether this Congress will show the same wisdom – or if it will implement revolutionary technology from its infancy, leaving what should be a new generation of American economic power to competing nations that will not make the same mistake.
Defying the Principle of Weapons
Even if we set aside the financial crisis that is bound to follow as a result of any breach of crypto/AI software, the government’s approach to construction – which could be set in motion forever – is a. CLARITY Act without strong BRCA protections—represents something more fundamental: a violation of the basic principles of the American constitution.
We don’t blame car inspectors as bankers because the driver used a Ford. We don’t blame Google engineers for the attack because criminals hacked Gmail. We don’t blame Microsoft engineers for embezzlement because another team was tracking their money using Excel. In all other areas in American commerce, we recognize the basic principle of law: the manufacturer of a tool is not responsible for misuse.
Crypto developers are class itself for the manufacturers of weapons in the American economy are being chosen for retaliation. And the tool they’re building — secure, open source software that empowers people to act without intermediaries — is arguably more in line with American values of personal freedom, financial privacy, and free enterprise than any technology since the printing press.
This is not true of the party. BRCA was introduced by Republicans and Democrats. It passed the House of Representatives with a margin of 70%. The principle it entails – that printing code is not a crime – should be as indisputable as the fact that printing a newspaper is not a crime. But here we are, watching the Congress that promised to make America the crypto capital of the world discussing one possible solution.
What Congress Needs to Hear
Making America the world’s crypto capital was a central promise of the new administration and the many congressmen who rose to office with it. Voters heard that promise. Companies have heard. The world heard. The CLARITY Act, without protections for bullet manufacturers, cannot fulfill that promise.
The fight against stablecoin yields has been resolved. No one wants to see the digital yuan succeed because the bankers need the train to keep going on Wall Street. Regulatory competition between the SEC and CFTC will be eliminated. A new Howey plan will be created. These are all important points, but in the end they are just that – implementation details. The question at hand – which determines whether there will be any American crypto companies left to regulate by 2030 – is whether Congress will protect those who build this technology from prosecution for writing code.
BRCA should be included in any market design bill. It should be combined with teeth. And it should not be reduced, painted, or sold in domestic discussions about what, although important, is not the difference between a successful company in America and one that packs its bags to Hong Kong or Singapore.
Congress has a very narrow chance left. The midterm elections in November look set to be a political earthquake. The legislative time in Washington DC is running out of sand. The opportunity for the United States to demonstrate its continued leadership in the new multilateral system is running out. The time to do this is now – not because the crypto community needs it, but because the principles of American technology, equal treatment under the law, and our global economic and technological leadership demand it.
The question is not whether the United States will pass the market regulation bill. The question is whether the bill would be worth the paper it is printed on.
This is a guest post by Kyle Olney. The opinions expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
