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Decompiled: Senate Strips DeFi Developer Liability From CLARITY Markup Behind the meter on yesterday's CLARITY Act markup: the Senate Banking Committee voted down a Van Hollen amendment that would have wrapped DeFi protocols inside the Bank Secrecy Act and, more importantly for anyone shipping code, attached personal liability to developers who "intentionally designed or maintained" software that ended up moving illicit funds.
The amendment did not just lose on policy. It lost on a question of what a smart contract actually is. Decoded, the rejected provision tried to do two things at once.
First, treat a deployed protocol as a regulated financial intermediary by analogy to a bank or money transmitter. Second, treat its authors the way you would treat the CFO of that intermediary.
The engineering objection is straightforward: once a contract is deployed to an EVM-compatible chain, the original developer has no privileged write path.
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