OCC Says Banks Can Hold Crypto, but Should They?
Blockchain and banking have, since the former’s inception, operated almost entirely at odds. Cryptocurrencies, after all, were invented as a decentralized method to store value, designed to operate outside of the intermediaries and custodial third parties that make up the traditional, regulated financial system.
The original bitcoin whitepaper’s very first sentence talks about the goal of allowing “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
But on Friday (March 7), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) reclarified certain crypto banking permissions, publishing Interpretive Letter 1183 to confirm that crypto-asset custody, certain stablecoin…
