The US security agency is opening the door for Wall Street banks to hold crypto

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The Wall Street regulator has made it easier for banks to expand their cryptocurrency businesses by overturning a Biden administration rule that made it too expensive to hold digital assets.

In one of the first pro-crypto movements of Donald TrumpThe second president, the Securities and Exchange Commission recently on Thursday changed the guidance known as SAB 121, which required the organizations to treat digital tokens held by customers as liabilities on the balance sheets.

The change underscores expectations that Trump will take a more accommodating approach to the digital assets sector, undoing the dubious views the SEC has taken during the. Joe Biden‘s system.

Major groups are already taking a serious interest in crypto assets and technology, with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink this week calling on the SEC to “quickly embrace” the firms’ ability to create backed tokens. are stocks and bonds.

In a sign of Trump’s pro-crypto policy, the president on Thursday also issued an executive order setting priorities for cryptocurrencies and asking cabinet-level officials to report a few months from now with recommendations for regulatory and legislative proposals.

While Trump’s pick to head the SEC, Paul Atkins, is awaiting confirmation by the US Senate, acting chairman Mark Uyeda and fellow Republican commissioner Hester Peirce have put the regulator on a more crypto track -friendly, creating a task force and dismantling SAB 121.

SAB 121 “created a punitive framework that effectively prevented US banks from providing securities services for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies”, said Mark Palmer, an equity research analyst at The Benchmark Company. “Traditional banks will now be able to offer crypto storage services without facing de facto penalties.”

Even before the SEC took action, major US banks were eagerly anticipating the ability to court crypto buyers as Trump and his allies in the executive and legislative branches paved the way for the digital asset.

“We want to have the ability to offer crypto-crypto, and our expectation is that at some point, the regulations around crypto will allow us to do that,” Rick Wurster, chief executive of Charles Schwab, told analysts on the call. this week.

The American Bankers Association and other industry leaders last year called on Biden to formally reject the SEC’s guidance after measures to do so passed both houses of Congress in May 2024.

“This is a step in the right direction,” said Kevin Fromer, president of the Financial Services Forum, which represents the largest banks.

Brian Daly, an attorney at Akin Gump, noted that custodial services were “the name of everything” for financial institutions when providing crypto services to clients. The old law “actually made it impossible for all the responsible banks and brokers and financial intermediaries that we rely on to be custodians of crypto”, Daly said.

The price of bitcoin rose more than 1.5 percent on Friday to $ 105,800, just shy of around $ 109,000.