This week, Representatives Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) reintroduced the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA)—a bipartisan bill that offers essential clarity for developers, miners, stakers, and other innovators building non-custodial crypto infrastructure in the United States.
Rep. Torres explained the bill’s importance succinctly:
The United States should be the global home for responsible innovation, not a place where developers are punished for building open-source software or experimenting with new technologies. This bill provides clear, commonsense rules for developers who never take custody of consumer funds. If we want to keep the next generation of builders in the United States, this kind of legal clarity is essential.
Coin Center agrees; The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act is the best way to protect American crypto developers and innovators from undue regulation by prosecution. Recent misapplication of licensing laws to devs has substantially chilled the development of privacy and freedom-enhancing tech in the U.S. Avoiding surprise prosecutions, creating legal clarity, and encouraging free speech and software development are not partisan issues; they are core American values, and the BRCA codifies them.
Majority Whip Emmer has been a champion of this approach since 2018, consistently arguing that developers of decentralized tools—who never take custody of consumer funds—should not be regulated like custodial financial institutions.
Having Rep. Torres and Majority Whip Emmer as the lead sponsors at introduction—both co-chairs of the Crypto Caucus, members of the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Digital Assets, and trusted voices on bipartisan tech policy—significantly improves the chances that this narrowly tailored, non-partisan bill becomes law.