In a June four announcement, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is on the lookout for Banks and crypto companies to weigh in on how the 2 can work together.

Crypto meets Banks

The Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking asks Banks and business leadership to reply to quite spate of questions – notably:

“What activities correlated cryptocurrencies or cryptoassets are commercial enterprise services companies or bank customers engaged in and what are the barriers or obstacles to further adoption of crypto-related activities in the banking industry?”

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Acting Comptroller Brian Brooks portrayed right now’s announcement as trying to bridge the hole between finance and crypto. He hoped-for the work studying:

“Ways the cryptocurrency regime necessarily banking services, ways that they need to transact crosswise the bank rails, etc. So we have affirmatively come out and said, give us information about what crypto necessarily from banking and banking necessarily from crypto, because we want to really do something in that space.”

Crypto vet Brooks’ first week on the head of the work

The OCC is the key banking governor throughout the United States Treasury. The latest announcement comes as a part of a flurry of exercise since Brooks took the reins on the work in the beginning of this week.

In March, Brooks joined the OCC from Coinbase, the place he served as chief authorized officer, which can clarify the curiosity in crypto. Looking forward, he instructed Cointelegraph that crucial the position of Banks as custodians and the place stablecoins slot in are important objectives going into his time period:

“The OCC, quickly under my watch, will get a position together as to what do we think of national Banks as appropriate custodians for cryptocurrency. We don’t have a view on it and I don’t want to prejudge that but it is sure as shootin an interest of mine from my past life that we need to come to ground on it. And then there’s the question of what do we think of stablecoins? Are stable coins equivalent to currency or are the cash equivalents? Can they be held by Banks in an awe-inspiring format or if they’re held outside of a bank? Is that splashed by banking regulations?”

Treasury and crypto

Regulators inside the U.S. and overseas have been increasingly crypto. Many have taken Brooks’ hiring on the OCC as proof of bigger curiosity in onboarding crypto capabilities into the federal authorities’s arsenal. Just in March, weeks earlier than that hiring, the Treasury held a gathering with leadership inside the crypto business to study extra.