OCC says banks can hold certain cryptocurrencies to pay gas fees in latest guidance

Banks pays fuel charges and maintain the cryptocurrency wanted to pay these community charges, in line with a brand new letter from the Treasury Division’s Workplace of the Comptroller of the Coin.

The OCC, which oversees banks, mentioned banks could must pay community charges as a part of doing enterprise and maintain cryptocurrencies on their stability sheets to pay these charges. Interpretive letter 1186 on Tuesday.

“We affirm that the proposed actions, as described and certified by the Financial institution, are permissible,” the OCC mentioned within the letter.

The OCC cited Ethereum for example, saying that the Ethereum community requires transactions to be denominated in ETH.

“Such a person must both preserve a separate ETH account, conduct a spot commerce on a crypto asset trade to acquire ETH previous to the transaction, contact a third-party community supplier, or get hold of ETH by way of another means,” the OCC mentioned. “This course of could contain prices and vital dangers, together with dangers related to operational complexity, adjustments in asset costs and delayed transactions.”

Replace crypto pointers

Over the previous 12 months underneath the Trump administration, regulators, together with the OCC, have modified their stance on crypto.

The Federal Reserve has since withdrawn pointers that beforehand discouraged banks from collaborating in crypto.

The central financial institution additionally launched a joint with the OCC assertion Through the summer time, it was defined, amongst different issues, how the prevailing guidelines apply to banks that maintain crypto on behalf of shoppers.

The OCC has carried out that too clearlyacknowledged that US banks can purchase and promote crypto belongings on their behalf. The company additionally mentioned it was to delete references to reputational threat from its manuals and pointers, though it famous it might not change its expectations about how banks deal with threat.

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