FDIC Unseals 175 Documents Exposing US Banks Debanking of Crypto Firms

The Federal Insurance Deposit Corporation (FDIC) is unsealing hundreds of documents that expose how US institutions were instructed to be deprived of crypto-related services.

In a new press release, the FDIC – the government agency that insures deposits in US banks – says it is unveiling 175 documents revealing how it supervised banks that participated in or were interested in crypto-related services.

Travis Hill, Acting Chairman of the FDIC, said in the press release that the documents revealed today show the FDIC made it so difficult for banks to expose themselves to digital assets and blockchain services, that many of them gave up trying.

“I have been critical in the past of the FDIC’s approach to crypto assets and blockchain. As I said last March, the FDIC’s approach ‘has contributed to a general perception that the agency was closed for business if institutions are interested in anything related to blockchain or distributed ledger technology’…

The documents that we are releasing today show that requests from these banks were almost universally met with resistance, ranging from repeated requests for further information, to multi-month periods of silence as institutions waited for responses, to directives from supervisors to pause, suspend, or refrain from expanding all crypto or blockchain-related activity.

Both individually and collectively, these and other actions sent the message to banks that it would be extraordinarily difficult – if not impossible – to move forward. As a result, the vast majority of banks simply stopped trying.”

Last December, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Coinbase found dozens of instances where the FDIC asked banks to freeze crypto-related services.

At the time, Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal said the information all but confirmed the notion that the US government was attempting to undermine the digital assets industry was not a conspiracy theory.

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