A massive coalition of tech lobbying groups and crypto companies jointly issued a letter to the Senate Banking Committee Wednesday, warning they will collectively protest an upcoming crypto market structure bill unless it features key legal protections for software developers.
“We […] speak to Congress with one voice: provide robust, nationwide protections for software developers and non-custodial service providers in market structure legislation,” the letter reads. “Without such protections, we cannot support a market structure bill.”
A total of 114 parties signed the letter, including Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase, DCG, Grayscale, Kraken, Paradigm, Solana Labs, and Uniswap Labs. Numerous lobbying groups endorsed the letter, which was coordinated by the DeFi Education Fund, including the Chamber of Progress—a mainstream tech lobbying group funded in part by Amazon, Apple, Google, and Uber.
A source familiar with the push to draft the letter told Decrypt the initiative was prompted in part by concerns that some Senate Democrats might soon attempt to add language to the market structure bill criminally implicating software developers who publish programs used for money laundering or sanctions evasion.
Preventing developers from facing such criminal liability “is an issue that fully unites the industry,” the source said.
Today’s letter praised the House for recently passing the CLARITY Act, its own version of market structure legislation, which included language effectively carving out decentralized finance and peer-to-peer on-chain transactions from crypto regulation.
But it also framed such measures as insufficient, and urged the Senate to go further by adding language shielding software developers from criminal liability.
“The leaders of the crypto industry are speaking with one voice on a fundamental principle: public blockchains are neutral infrastructure just like the internet, roads, or bridges,” Miller Whitehouse-Levine, CEO of the Solana Policy Institute, another co-signer of the letter, said in a a statement shared with Decrypt.
“The U.S. doesn’t criminalize the engineers who build our highways when someone uses them to commit a crime,” he continued. “Congress must apply that same principle to digital infrastructure and include comprehensive protections for developers and non-custodial service providers in any market structure legislation.”
Notably, today’s letter called for the Senate’s market structure bill to explicitly clarify that software developers cannot be prosecuted as operators of money transmitting businesses under U.S. code 1960. It also insisted the federal exemption preempt all conflicting state laws.
Earlier this month, the Trump Department of Justice successfully convicted Roman Storm, a software developer behind coin mixing service Tornado Cash, of violating that law, because the platform dealt in funds known to have been derived from a crime, or intended to be used to support unlawful activity.
The Trump administration, which has otherwise taken an aggressively pro-crypto approach this year, appeared to walk back the prosecution weeks later, when a DOJ official told an audience of crypto industry leaders that law enforcement will no longer bring such charges against developers of “truly decentralized” software automating peer-to-peer transactions that does not take custody of user assets.
Though leaders of many top crypto organizations celebrated the announcement at the time, they appeared to strike a firmer tone in today’s letter.
“Legislation should not regulate developers differently based on the type of software they create when they are not acting as intermediaries and don’t have control or custody of user assets,” they wrote. “Without these explicit safeguards, the bill risks stifling innovation, undermining open-source development, and driving blockchain infrastructure development out of the United States.”
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