Coin Center published a paper in April 2026 arguing that publishing cryptocurrency software, whether a blockchain node client, a smart contract, or a user interface, is protected speech under the First Amendment, not a regulated financial activity. Authors Peter Van Valkenburgh and Lizandro Pieper frame the distinction around a single question: did the person hold or move anyone else’s money, or did they simply publish code that other people chose to run themselves.

The case the paper argues against

The paper is written directly against real enforcement actions, not a hypothetical. It cites the prosecution of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, along with SEC, IRS, and Department of Justice theories that would treat a software publisher as if they were a broker or a money transmitter. Coin Center’s argument is that this substitutes a real legal category, someone who custodies or moves funds, with an invented one built around code that merely makes peer-to-peer transactions possible.

Why the line matters beyond crypto

The underlying question, whether publishing a tool makes you responsible for how strangers later use it, is not unique to cryptocurrency. It is the same question that has come up around encryption software, file-sharing protocols, and now AI models. Coin Center’s position is that answering it by expanding financial-intermediary law to cover software authorship sets a precedent regulators could reach for again, well outside crypto, any time a publishing act enables conduct they don’t like.

WikiActivism’s view

Prosecuting a developer for what other people did with code they published, rather than for anything the developer themselves did with anyone’s money, punishes speech for its downstream use. That is exactly the outcome the First Amendment exists to prevent, and treating a publisher as a financial intermediary because their code happens to move value does not change what actually took place: they wrote something and released it.

Source: Coin Center, “Software is Speech: Why Regulators Cannot Invent the Missing Middlemen”, April 2026.