OCC greenlights nationwide banks to run nodes and stablecoin networks

Monday night, the Treasury’s Workplace of the Comptroller of the Foreign money advised nationwide banks that they’re allowed to run unbiased nodes for distributed ledger networks.

Referring to of unbiased node verification networks, the OCC’s interpretive letter says that banks “could use new applied sciences, together with INVNs and associated stablecoins, to carry out bank-permissible capabilities, akin to fee actions.”

Coming amid an excessive amount of uncertainty as to the way forward for stablecoins, the OCC’s announcement is large information. The workplace, nonetheless, cautions that there are cyber dangers inherent to utilizing such expertise:

“Banks should additionally pay attention to potential dangers when conducting INVN-related actions, together with operational dangers, compliance danger, and fraud. New applied sciences require sufficient technological experience to make sure banks can handle these dangers in a secure and sound method.”

Brian Brooks, who previously led Coinbase’s authorized group, has been the Performing Comptroller of the Foreign money since Could. Throughout his tenure, the workplace has put out a number of steerage authorizing banks to be extra lively in crypto and, extra not too long ago, barring them from reducing off providers to authorized industries. 

Main lobbyist group the Blockchain Affiliation famous that “The letter states that blockchains have the identical standing as different world monetary networks, akin to SWIFT, ACH, and FedWire.” Such flagships mechanisms of worldwide funds have needed to up their video games in response to competitors from blockchain-backed funds in recent times. 

Main lobbyist group the Blockchain Affiliation famous of right now’s announcement that “The letter states that blockchains have the identical standing as different world monetary networks, akin to SWIFT, ACH, and FedWire.” Such flagships mechanisms of worldwide funds have needed to up their video games in response to competitors from blockchain-backed funds in recent times. 

The brand new steerage follows up on a separate group of regulators laying out new steerage for stablecoin operators instantly earlier than Christmas. 

The topic of stablecoin authorized standing within the U.S. has taken on an outsized position over the previous month, particularly after Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib launched a invoice that appeared to outlaw any operation of a stablecoin community, together with personal individuals working,  for instance, Ethereum nodes that course of DAI transactions.