The Banking Group of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP would like to welcome you to its newest client tool, the Debevoise Fintech Blog. The goal of the blog is to help financial institutions sift through this complex legal landscape and keep abreast of developments in fintech and digital assets. The blog will cover topics spanning the fintech and digital assets regulatory…

As the digital asset industry continues to grow, regulators also have grown more and more active in the space. In addition, with cryptocurrency and payments as one of the main use cases for digital assets thus far, it is no surprise that regulators have devoted significant attention to those facilitating transactions in cryptocurrencies and the issue of whether such facilitators…

With Congress back in session following its winter recess, we expect an increasing focus on crypto-asset businesses, especially stablecoins, which are digital assets that are pegged to real assets — usually the U.S. dollar. Stablecoins have experienced incredible growth and expansion recently. The aggregate stablecoin supply grew by 388% in 2021, from $29 billion to over $140 billion, a record…

The inter-agency crypto-asset policy sprint initiative has finally taken off. This morning the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (collectively, “the Agencies”) issued their first joint statement (the “Statement”) summarizing progress on a series of crypto-asset[1] policy sprints and revealing next steps. The Statement is a continuation of an…

On November 21, 2021, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”) published a letter “clarifying” that certain cryptocurrency, distributed ledger and stablecoin activities addressed in three prior interpretive letters may be conducted only after a national bank or federal savings association receives a non-objection from its supervisory office (the “Letter”). The Letter also clarifies that a prior interpretive…