Sam - appreciate how open you have been to feedback and revising your post - but I am concerned you have missed or misunderstood one of the most important pieces of the feedback:
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From your revised blog: “If you host a website aimed at facilitating and encouraging US retail to connect to and trade on a DEX, this may end up falling under something like a broker-dealer/FCM/etc.
You may also potentially have KYC obligations…
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…To be clear, this is separate from generalized tooling for on-chain parsing and interfacing, e.g. etherscan.io”
This is an improvement but you also seem to be missing the whole point that a DeFi interface and etherscan are doing the same thing!
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If you agree something like etherscan should not require a license or kyc, then how can you still suggest an interface which does the same activity should require license/kyc?
What is regulated needs to be specific activity, not just presenting it in a different way.
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I fear you missing this point is a grave error and hope you will consider revising your post such that anything that simply passes information to and from a protocol/contract should not require onerous burdens.
A BD takes custody of funds, DeFi interfaces do not.
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could be!
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Happy to!
FWIW -- I don't think I necessarily think it's the perfect line to draw -- as much as anything else:
1) I think empirically it might be what regulators draw
2) I think that doing so preserves on-chain action as permissionless which is the most important thing
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This allows those that are building free and open self-custodial interfaces to build tools that simply pass data without needing 6-7 figure compliance teams.
Yet can still allow to regulate those who build products that take custody (which is fairly much closer to a BD).