U.S. Senators push legislation to ease burdens for developers, open-source developers may be exempt from fund transfer rules

【Blockchain Pulse】 More good news has arrived. U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden jointly reintroduced a bipartisan bill—the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. The core intention of this bill is very clear: to reassure developers and infrastructure providers and clarify their legal status under federal law.

In simple terms, this bill aims to distinguish two types of people: one is developers who purely write code and maintain open-source infrastructure; the other is financial institutions that control user funds. These two should not be conflated.

According to the bill, as long as developers and infrastructure providers do not have the legal right to move users’ digital assets, nor the unilateral ability to control those assets, they should not be classified as money transmitters under federal law. Cynthia Lummis’s straightforward and powerful view is: developers who only write code and maintain open-source infrastructure fundamentally do not access, control, or have the ability to access user funds—so why should they be regulated as money transmitters?

Ron Wyden adds from another perspective that forcing coding developers to comply with the same rules as exchanges and brokers is technically unfeasible and could erode privacy rights and freedom of speech. This stance is of great significance to the entire Web3 ecosystem.