OCC Confirms Banks Quietly Ghosted Crypto From 2020 to 2025 👻

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has confirmed that the nine largest banks under its supervision maintained policies between 2020 and September 2025 that effectively debanked the crypto sector, a practice widely referred to as Operation Chokepoint 2.0. The findings came in an OCC report completed under a supervisory review tied to an executive order signed by President Trump last year.

The institutions cited include JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citibank, and Wells Fargo, all among the largest U.S. lenders by assets. According to the OCC, these banks had internal frameworks that discouraged or restricted the provision of financial services to crypto-related clients, ranging from digital asset firms to exchanges and custodians.

The regulator identified two primary policy categories it said posed an elevated risk of influencing institutions to deny access to digital asset stakeholders. While the OCC stopped short of attributing explicit political direction, the timeframe aligns with the Biden administration, and crypto industry figures have long alleged that coordinated pressure from regulators pushed banks to cut ties with the sector.

Among the most prominent accusers were Gemini founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who publicly named JPMorgan as complicit in Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Their complaints were echoed by a broader swath of the crypto industry, which argued that the debanking campaign choked off banking access for legitimate firms and forced several outfits offshore.

The OCC's confirmation marks a formal acknowledgment from a top federal banking regulator that the policies existed and had the effect of excluding crypto from mainstream financial rails. The agency has not announced individual penalties but said it intends to integrate the findings into its broader supervisory framework going forward.