Wednesday brought a major news event—Brian Armstrong, the head of a leading compliant platform at a top US crypto exchange, directly called out on social media, saying that the version of the crypto market structure bill currently being pushed by the Senate Banking Committee is "essentially worse than existing regulations." He spoke quite boldly, just hours before the committee was scheduled to vote on it Thursday morning.

What's the background? The bill was originally intended to clarify some chaos—defining the boundaries of authority between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the crypto market, determining which digital assets are securities and which are commodities, and establishing a new set of disclosure and compliance standards. This was expected to be a milestone in US crypto regulation.

But Armstrong's change of stance is interesting. A certain compliant platform had been lobbying in Washington for months, participating in legislative negotiations, only to now turn around and say, "We’d rather have no bill at all than a bad one." He specifically criticized several core issues in his tweet, focusing on decentralized finance, stablecoin yields, and the division of regulatory powers.

This shift also reflects the accelerating emergence of internal disagreements within the crypto industry. Clearly, opinions on regulatory direction are not as unified as they seem on the surface.