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There’s no shortage of fintech news, and crypto news in particular practically bumps into you in the hallway. Every week, our finance & technology email will sort through the useful and the useless in fintech news and deliver it right to your inbox on Fridays. Sign up here.

There was a time when well-funded fintech companies would talk about how unbank-like they were.

That never really matched up with the reality of what was going on. “SoFi uses its balance sheet much like a bank to originate loans,” The Financial Times noted back in 2015.

Then SoFi just went ahead and applied for an industrial loan charter, which it later pulled. But it continued doing very bank-like things, including hiring a former Goldman Sachs banker to be its CEO.

Other fintechs—Square, Lending Club and Coinbase—kept pushing for national bank charters. And now, they might get them. Earlier this week, the Treasury Department issued a big report about how to promote financial innovation. One recommendation was for the “the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to further develop its special purpose national bank charter.” Sure enough, a few hours later the OCC announced it was going to create exactly that.

Fintech startup Glint enables using gold to purchase anything, from a cup of coffee to books, electronics and clothes. Could the use of gold as a digital currency herald a return to the long-abandoned gold standard?

The advantage of a national charter is that you don’t need to get into the weeds of state by state regulatory approval, which means you can compete with big banks, and do things like makes loans in any U.S. state, rather than be limited only to the states where you have gained the go-ahead of state regulators.

But a national charter also means that the way you compete with the big banks will have to be closer to how they do business than how a free-wheeling lender started by a hedge fund guy who just wants to refinance the student loans of every Stanford Business School graduate because obviously they are pretty good credits might do business.

The New York Times headline put it well when it said the move would mean that “Online Lenders and Payment Companies Get a Way to Act More Like Banks.”

The charter is not a sure thing—it will almost certainly be challenged with a lawsuit from a state bank regulator—but the overall industry trajectory is clear. Fintech companies want to be more like banks or at least enjoy the regulatory perks of being one.

More links!

Fidelity is launching the first free index funds. “Fidelity launched the first zero-cost index funds in the U.S.” The FT’s Robin Wigglesworth has this amusing quote from Morningstar’s Ben Johnson: “[Vanguard’s] fees and minimum investment thresholds are starting to look a little dated now.” Earlier this month Vanguard said it would it would get rid of almost all ETF trading fees. Part of this is clearly about marketing: something that costs 0.04% a year is so extremely cheap it might as well be free. But it’s not cheap enough that you can say, “this is free!”

If you’re worried about Fidelity making money, remember that the Contrafund has $130 billion in assets and a 0.74% expense ratio.

I joked that negative fees are surely around the corner, but it’s not that crazy: after all, banks effectively do by paying interest.

The NYSE’s parent company is planning to “launch a digital assets platform and a bitcoin futures product.” Starbucks is working on a project to help figure out how people could “convert their digital assets into U.S. dollars for use at Starbucks.” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal points out that “unless you’re on the run from the law and trying to avoid leaving a trail of payments that can help policy nail down your location, there’s literally zero reason to ever buy a cup of coffee using a cryptocurrency. None.”

This is, of course, totally right. But just because there is no reason to do something, doesn’t mean people won’t do it. If you give bitcoin enthusiasts the opportunity to show up in public and loudly proclaim that they are buying something in bitcoin, my hunch is that they will do it. It will serve no real purpose, but bitcoin is a brand and brands are part of people’s identities and provoke people to do all kinds of things. Of course, Starbucks is a company with almost 30,000 stores and $22 billion in revenue a year, so the bitcoin believer market is largely meaningless to the company’s business.

Relatedly, this is a very good piece on the limits of blockchain and the waning enthusiasm for it: “In 2017 and a little before, blockchain was a brand new shiny hammer. People have been looking everywhere for nails to pound with it, and spending a lot of money in the effort. But they’re finding that many transactional problems aren’t nails, that there are other hammers that might do the job better, and there are other problems that require many parties to agree on just how the hammer is to be used and by whom.”

A wild story about a Conservative Member of Parliament who was due to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars advising a blockchain start-up on its ICO.

A bitcoin whale’s bad trade leaves counterparties holding the bag.

Write to Ben Walsh at ben.walsh@barrons.com