The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued new policy guidance detailing how national banks can maintain crypto assets to be used to pay blockchain network “gas fees.”
In what is known as “Interpretative Letter No. 1186,” the agency said Tuesday that banks can keep digital assets on their balance sheets that they believe will be reasonably necessary for their operations.
Blockchain networks routinely require the use of their own specific token as a fee for transactions, so banks wishing to handle such activity must have the necessary assets on hand. Activity “explicitly permitted under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act” would require banks to pay network fees as an agent for customers or as part of their depository operations, the letter said.
The requirement that banks “pay network fees to facilitate the activities of otherwise permitted cryptoassets and principally hold amounts of cryptoassets on the balance sheet necessary to pay network fees for which the bank anticipates a reasonably foreseeable need is permissible for the bank,” the OCC concluded.
US banking regulators – also including the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the broader Treasury Department — are already working to write new rules to govern stablecoin issuers and activity based on the new GENIUS Act requirements. But those rules are not yet in place for the law that was approved earlier this year.
The OCC has reversed years of hesitance to let regulated banks engage in digital assets with the arrival of President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration. The agency is now headed by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould, who was confirmed by the Senate in July.
Read more: What are Ethereum gas fees?
