US Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden introduced the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) on January 12, 2026, aiming to write a basic rule into federal law: people who publish code, maintain blockchain nodes, or build open-source tools should not be treated as banks or money transmitters if they do not control customer funds.
The bill draws a line between software and custody
The proposal is presented as a bipartisan effort. Its central point is narrow but significant. According to the source material, publishing open-source software or operating a network node would not by itself make someone a financial institution, as long as that person does not have “unilateral control” over user assets. Lummis said software developers should not be treated like banks simply because they write code.
That distinction matters because a money transmitter label can bring expensive licensing requirements and bank-style audits. BRCA is designed to separate those obligations from software development activity. For coders, that is the whole issue.
2025 court cases shaped the push for the measure
The article links the bill directly to the legal pressure seen in 2025. Over that period, developers faced what the source describes as regulation through prosecution, with uncertainty over how existing law applied to code-based tools.
One case highlighted in the material is Tornado Cash. In August 2025, co-founder Roman Storm was convicted of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. His defense argued that he wrote code but did not control where funds moved. The jury rejected the idea that the software was only a neutral tool. That verdict sent a message through the developer community: writing code could carry criminal exposure.
The source also points to the November 2025 sentencing of Samourai Wallet founders on similar charges. It says those cases created a chilling effect, with some US developers stopping work or moving projects abroad rather than risk prosecution tied to software publication.
Introduced just before a major Senate committee review
The timing is also part of the strategy. The Senate Banking Committee is scheduled to mark up the broader crypto market structure bill, the Clarity Act, on January 15, 2026. By filing BRCA as a standalone measure ahead of that date, Lummis and Wyden are trying to keep developer protections visible during the larger debate instead of letting them get diluted in final negotiations.
Supporters argue the bill protects builders and technical tools, not criminal conduct. Critics, as described in the source, worry that exemptions of this kind could make illicit finance harder to trace. The dispute turns on one question: whether writing and publishing code should be regulated the same way as controlling other people’s money.