Call it the CPR for Operation Choke Point.
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a national bank regulator led by former Coinbase counsel Brian Books, has proposed a rule that would forbid banks to blacklist legal industries — including, presumably, cryptocurrency firms.
Under the proposed rule, banks could deny financial services to customers only on the basis of “quantitative, risk-based standards established in advance,” and not in response to political pressures.
The proposal, published Friday in the Federal Register, does not mention cryptocurrency. But it will likely come as welcome news to businesses in the space, which have long struggled to obtain, or keep, bank accounts in the U.S. Crypto firms have long relied on a handful of banks—Silvergate Bank, Signature Bank, and Metropolitan Commercial Bank among them—for their basic banking needs.
On the other hand, if banks in the world’s largest economy were forbidden to discriminate against…