Coinbase’s chief legal officer Paul Grewal says that unredacted letters show that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was attempting to sabotage a wide variety of activity in the crypto industry.
Grewal previously said that Coinbase’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests uncovered instances where the FDIC asked banks to freeze crypto services
Said Grewal at the time,
“The letters that show Operation Chokepoint 2.0 wasn’t just some crypto conspiracy theory. FDIC is still hiding behind way overbroad redactions. And they still haven’t produced more than a fraction of them.”
Grewal now says on the social media platform X that after using a court order to unredact many of the letters, there is clear evidence of a deliberate effort by the government to stifle the growth of crypto in the US.
“We finally got the unredacted OCP 2.0 letters from [the FDIC]. It took a court order but you can now read them for yourself… They show a coordinated effort to stop a wide variety of crypto activity — everything from basic BTC transactions to more complex offerings.
Note that FDIC magically found TWO more pause letters in this search after saying before that it had complied with an earlier Court order. It’s hard to believe in their good faith when their sweater further unravels every time we pull on the thread. The new Congress should launch hearings on all this without delay.”
According to investor and crypto advocate Nic Carter, the unredacted letters prove the FDIC pressured dozens of financial institutions to pause or curtail services involving Bitcoin (BTC) and other crypto assets.
“So in summary, we now have it on record that between 2022 and 2023 the FDIC sent out at least 25 letters asking banks to indefinitely pause or curtail:
– Bitcoin and Ethereum buy/sell products for bank clients
– private blockchain settlement networks
– public blockchain settlement for bank client transfers
– permissioned stablecoin issuance
– the holding of crypto assets and NFTs by banks
– onboarding of ‘ecosystem’ firms as clients (letter 16)
– Bitcoin-backed lending
– providing depository services to stablecoins
– issuing debit cards with Bitcoin cash back.”
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