White House backs DeFi dev protections

The White House is publicly backing legal protections for decentralized finance software developers as the Senate weighs the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. (whitehouse.gov) The bill at the center of the fight is House Resolution 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, introduced on May 29, 2025 by Representative French Hill and passed by the House on July 17, 2025 by a 294-134 vote. It was received in the Senate on September 18, 2025 and referred to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. (congress.gov) The Trump White House said on July 15, 2025 that the administration supports the bill’s goals and called it a framework that would let “builders, developers, and entrepreneurs” operate without fear of arbitrary enforcement. The statement also said senior advisers would recommend that President Donald Trump sign the bill if it reached his desk in its current form. (whitehouse.gov) The current dispute is not over whether crypto trading platforms should be regulated. It is over whether people who publish code or maintain non-custodial blockchain tools should be treated like money transmitters or custodians when they never control customer funds. (congress.gov) Congress’s own research arm says the CLARITY Act would put the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the lead for digital commodities, keep some Securities and Exchange Commission authority over primary offerings, and apply anti-money-laundering rules to exchanges, brokers, and dealers. The same analysis says decentralized finance activities such as validating would be excluded from the bill’s registration requirements, though not from anti-fraud and anti-manipulation rules. (congress.gov) That distinction has become a separate legislative push. The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act in the House, and a Senate version introduced as Senate Bill 3611 in January 2026, would create a safe harbor for “non-controlling” developers and service providers under money transmission laws. (congress.gov, congress.gov) The White House’s latest public defense came through Patrick Witt, a top crypto adviser to Trump, who said on April 10, 2026 that developer protections are “one of the most important aspects” of the bill and that “criminalizing code” would drive innovation offshore. The post did not change the bill text by itself, but it put the administration on the side of keeping those protections in the Senate debate. (theblock.co) Supporters say the legal line should turn on control of customer assets, not on writing software. Coin Center said the separate developer-protection bill would codify existing Financial Crimes Enforcement Network guidance that publishing non-custodial software is not money transmission. (coincenter.org) Critics of broad crypto legislation have argued in other debates that looser definitions can create gaps in oversight, especially when decentralized systems still have identifiable founders, token treasuries, or governance groups. The CLARITY Act itself keeps anti-fraud authority intact and subjects exchanges, brokers, and dealers to the Bank Secrecy Act, which is Congress’s answer to that concern in the current draft. (congress.gov, congress.gov) The next test is in the Senate, where lawmakers are still negotiating unresolved crypto provisions and committee action has not yet produced a final bill. For now, the administration has made one point explicit: it wants federal crypto rules that regulate intermediaries without treating software developers as if they hold the keys to customer money. (congress.gov, theblock.co)