U.S. Fed Officially Scraps Specialist Group Meant to Oversee Crypto Issues

The Federal Reserve continued its relaxation of crypto oversight on Friday with a move to shut down a two-year-old supervisory program intended to keep a special eye on banks' crypto ties, instead folding that task back to its day-to-day oversight work.

The central bank established its short-lived Novel Activities Supervision Program during the tenure of Vice Chairman Michael Barr, the board's supervision chief appointed by then-President Joe Biden, and the agency is now sunsetting the effort and will "return to monitoring banks' novel activities through the normal supervisory process," according to a Fed statement on Friday.

Since the start of President Donald Trump's second term, the Fed has tended to move in step with the other banking regulators who've pulled back on aggressive digital assets scrutiny. In April, the Federal Reserve withdrew its earlier crypto guidance that directed bankers to get approvals from the government supervisors before engaging in new crypto activity. The other two U.S. federal banking regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. made matching moves to toss out the previous guidance, leaving banks to make their own crypto decisions under existing risk-management expectations.

The idea behind the novel-activity program was that the Fed needed to gather special expertise and put a closer focus on risks to the banking system that might emerge from innovative and untested technologies. The initiative followed closely in the aftermath of the 2023 crisis in which three U.S. lenders closely associated with technology and crypto clients — Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank — failed about five months earlier.

In the two years since establishing the program, though, the Fed has "strengthened its understanding of those activities, related risks, and bank risk management practices," according to Friday's statement, so the work will be directed back to the regular supervisory process.

The crypto industry and U.S. banking regulators have been through a tumultuous few years in which digital assets firms and insiders have complained of an organized campaign from government entities to cut them off from bank services — a campaign the industry and its Republican lawmaker allies call Operation Chokepoint 2.0. But Trump has appointed crypto-friendly officials to redirect the banking agencies, and though the Fed is protective of its independence, it's generally joined the OCC and FDIC in the trend of relaxing crypto constraints.

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