White house's $1 trillion infrastructure bill appears to be worded in a way that anyone involved in the crypto ecosystem may be classified as a "broker" that could include miners, validators & software developers. If the bill is passed as is, it would imply that anyone involved in the ecosystem would have to capture the details of every customer/transaction and report it to the IRS (1). For those within the crypto ecosystem this is a burden crushing regulation that would destroy innovation not to mention decentralised finance (DeFi), which I think is the prime target here because banks absolutely loath DeFi as it takes away control from the legacy banking system. Reason I say this is because at the last minute an amendement was brought forward, which allows bitcoin (BTC) to be exempt from the reporting mandate, this was supported (2). There was an amendement brought forward to include proof of stake validators, wallet providers and blockchain developers to be included in the exemption but it was voted down (3). As it stands the burden of mandated reporting only applies to proof of stake alt coins, this is nothing more than a perfectly calculated attack on DeFi.

Legacy banking system has been aware of decentralised finance since its inception, but has not not been a viable threat to them until recently as use case & adoption rates of DeFi are at an all time high. The bill would regulate DeFi out of existence with compliance costs, this is clearly a sinister attack on crypto. The white house now has DeFi in its cross hairs what happens next will depend on how the bill is voted on in the coming days.