Jonathan Gould, the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, traveled to Wyoming last week to address a blockchain symposium and left little ambiguity about where he stands: the federal banking regulator he leads is not in the business of insulating traditional banks from the competitive pressures posed by digital assets and crypto-native institutions. The remarks, delivered in one of the most crypto-progressive state jurisdictions in the United States, amount to the clearest signal yet that the OCC under Gould intends to chart a markedly different course from the crypto-skeptical posture that characterized much of the prior regulatory era.
Gould's appearance in Wyoming was no accident of geography. The state has spent years cultivating a legal and regulatory framework designed to attract blockchain businesses, including its Special Purpose Depository Institution charter, which allows crypto firms to operate bank-like entities under state supervision. By choosing this venue, Gould implicitly endorsed the legitimacy of that ecosystem — and the broader principle that federally chartered banks and crypto-native financial entities can and should coexist within a coherent regulatory framework, rather than occupy opposing camps of a zero-sum contest.
The most arresting remark to emerge from the symposium was Gould's plain-spoken assertion that protecting traditional banks is simply not his job. This is a pointed departure from how some incumbent financial institutions have long perceived — and in some cases actively lobbied — federal banking regulators to behave. Large commercial banks and their trade associations have historically argued, with some success, that extending regulatory legitimacy to crypto firms creates an unlevel playing field, particularly when those firms access payment rails, custody frameworks, or deposit-insurance adjacencies without bearing the full compliance burden of a nationally chartered bank. Gould appears unconvinced by that framing.
What Gould's position suggests, in practical terms, is an OCC more willing to issue or facilitate interpretive guidance, no-action letters, or even formal charters that bring crypto-native businesses into the federal banking perimeter — not to coddle incumbents, but to establish supervisory visibility over an expanding sector. This is consistent with a broader shift in Washington's approach to digital assets throughout 2025 and into 2026, as Congress has advanced stablecoin legislation and the executive branch has moved to re-engage the crypto industry after years of enforcement-first regulatory doctrine.
The crypto-inclusive tone Gould struck in Wyoming also carries implications for how national banks themselves behave. If the OCC signals that digital asset activities — custody, tokenized deposits, blockchain-based settlement — fall within the permissible activities of federally chartered institutions, bank chief executives who have remained on the sidelines face growing strategic pressure to act. The regulatory permission structure, long cited as the primary obstacle to deeper bank engagement with digital assets, is visibly shifting under Gould's leadership.
Critics of this trajectory will argue that speed carries its own risks. The OCC's historical mandate is safety and soundness, and moving aggressively to integrate crypto activities into the national banking system before robust supervisory frameworks are fully operational could introduce the kind of contagion risk that regulators spent the post-2022 crypto winter attempting to quarantine. The collapse of crypto-adjacent banks in 2023 remains a live cautionary reference point for prudential supervisors globally, including at the Bank for International Settlements and the European Banking Authority, both of which have urged careful sequencing of crypto integration into traditional banking structures.
Gould's Wyoming appearance nonetheless reflects a political and institutional moment in which the risk of regulatory inaction — ceding the crypto space to lightly supervised entities outside the federal banking perimeter — is now judged by some officials to outweigh the risk of cautious, supervised integration. That is a significant philosophical realignment, and one whose downstream effects on bank strategy, crypto firm behavior, and competitive dynamics across the financial sector will take months to fully materialize.
What This Means for the Industry
For banks, the OCC's posture under Gould represents an opening — but also an expectation. Regulators signaling openness to crypto-inclusive activity are simultaneously signaling that they expect supervised institutions, not unregulated platforms, to be the primary vehicles through which Americans access digital asset services. For crypto firms, the message is an invitation to engage the federal charter process rather than rely exclusively on state-level frameworks. And for traditional incumbents accustomed to regulatory frameworks that, consciously or not, limited the competitive field, Gould's declaration that their protection is not the OCC's concern is a market signal as much as a policy one — the era of regulatory shelter from crypto competition is, by the OCC chief's own account, over.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.