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By Jesse Hamilton|Edited by Nikhilesh De
May 7, 2025, 9:31 p.m.
- The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is further letting bankers off the crypto leash, clarifying through letters Wednesday that banks can buy and sell their customers’ crypto assets.
- The banks can also use third-party servicers on crypto work, the OCC said.
- This follows earlier OCC guidance — matched by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve — that reversed a previous policy restricting bankers to getting signoffs from the regulator before they could move on crypto matters.
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, has continued its about-face to earlier resistance to cryptocurrency in banking, issuing interpretive letters that say the institutions can — at their customers’ behest — buy and sell crypto assets in custody.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
The newly explained policy stance released by the OCC on Wednesday also clarified that the bankers can outsource crypto activities to third parties, including custody and executive services. As long as it all still checks the boxes of the watchdog’s safety-and-soundness requirements, the OCC is giving the banks more crypto freedom.
This week’s move follows the agency’s March reversal of a longstanding policy that demanded bankers check with their government supervisors before moving ahead with new crypto business. “These letters signal a shift in the OCC’s approach,” Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos, Starkware general counsel and a former chief legal officer at Cboe Digital, noted on social media site X. She said the agency now seems to be melding crypto into traditional banking. And the additional guidance that third-parties are okay “is a boon to regulated crypto native service providers.”
Read More: OCC Says Banks Can Engage in Crypto Custody and Certain Stablecoin Activities
Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk’s deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.
