Cryptocurrency advocacy group Coin Center has intensified its legal defense of software developers, publishing a report arguing that writing and publishing cryptocurrency software code constitutes protected speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The report, released on Monday, April 20, 2026, was authored by Coin Center Executive Director Peter Van Valkenburgh and Director of Research Lizandro Pieper.
The core argument draws a sharp distinction between protected speech and regulatable conduct. Coin Center contends that publishing code is analogous to publishing a book or a recipe and should receive full First Amendment protection. The organization asserts that a developer only enters "regulatable territory" when they take direct control over user funds, execute transactions on behalf of users, or make financial decisions for them. Merely publishing and maintaining code, they argue, should not trigger licensing or compliance obligations typically applied to financial intermediaries.
The report directly challenges what it calls the "functional code theory," a legal perspective where some courts have suggested software resembles conduct because it can produce real-world effects. "We argue that such activities are pure speech and that the Supreme Court’s existing jurisprudence insists on this interpretation even if some lower courts have gone astray," the authors wrote. They ground their position in established legal precedents, including the 1985 Supreme Court decision in Lowe v. SEC and a 1999 Ninth Circuit ruling in Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice that struck down export controls on encryption source code.
The legal debate is intensifying amid high-profile criminal cases against developers. Coin Center points to recent prosecutions as evidence of growing legal pressure. Roman Storm, a developer linked to the Tornado Cash privacy protocol, was convicted in 2025 on charges related to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Similarly, developers behind the Samourai Wallet, a privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet, received prison sentences of four to five years on comparable charges. These cases have sparked industry-wide concern that developers could face liability for how third parties use their open-source tools.
Van Valkenburgh and Pieper argue that applying traditional financial regulations, built around intermediaries, to software developers for "administrative convenience" risks stretching the law beyond its intent. "Crypto software does not necessitate the invention of new legal doctrines or novel carveouts. It requires the faithful application of settled First Amendment principles to a new technological context," they stated. The report concludes with a powerful assertion: "In the age of computers, where software is the primary means for expressing ideas and organizing economic life, those principles matter more, not less. Writing and publishing code is speech. And in a free society, speech cannot be licensed into silence."
Not all legal experts are convinced. A 2023 Yale Law Journal analysis warned that extending First Amendment protection broadly across all aspects of decentralized finance (DeFi), rather than narrowly to code publication itself, may overreach existing precedents. Meanwhile, organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have long supported the narrow "code as speech" position.
