Federal Reserve withdrew special crypto guidance for banks

The Federal Reserve Board withdrew special supervisory guidance for bank crypto-asset and dollar-token activity on April 24, 2025, removing an advance-notification expectation and a separate written nonobjection process. The Board said it would monitor crypto activity through its normal supervisory process instead.

The action, announced at 5:30 p.m. EDT, mattered because it changed how Federal Reserve-supervised institutions approached the regulatory gate before launching certain digital-asset businesses. It did not make every crypto activity permissible, approve a particular stablecoin, or remove federal and state law. It shifted the process from crypto-specific preliminary steps toward ordinary bank supervision.

Two supervisory letters were rescinded

The first withdrawal covered SR 22-6/CA 22-6, issued August 16, 2022. That letter expected a Federal Reserve-supervised bank to notify its lead supervisory contact before beginning any crypto-asset activity, and to notify promptly if it was already engaged. It listed custody, customer purchase-and-sale facilitation, crypto-collateralized lending and stablecoin issuance among possible activities.

The second covered SR 23-8/CA 23-5, issued August 8, 2023, for state member banks seeking to issue, hold or transact in “dollar tokens” used for payments. That process called for written supervisory nonobjection before a proposed activity began, including testing, after a bank demonstrated controls for operational, cybersecurity, liquidity, illicit-finance and consumer-compliance risks.

Rescinding the letters removed those crypto-specific procedural expectations. The Federal Reserve’s April 24 notice did not say those underlying risks had disappeared. Nor did it supersede statutory permissions, required filings, safety-and-soundness standards, anti-money-laundering duties or consumer-protection rules.

The agencies also retired two joint warnings

On April 24, the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation also withdrew two interagency statements from 2023. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency had already withdrawn from both as they applied to national banks and federal savings associations on March 7, 2025.

The January 3, 2023 statement had emphasized volatility, legal uncertainty, fraud, contagion and other crypto-sector risks. The February 23, 2023 statement focused on liquidity risks from deposits linked to crypto companies and stablecoin reserves, including the possibility of rapid and unpredictable inflows or outflows. Even that second statement said banks were neither prohibited nor discouraged from serving any lawful customer class.

The FDIC described the April 24 withdrawal as clarification that banking organizations may conduct permissible crypto activities and serve crypto-related persons and firms, subject to applicable law and safe-and-sound operation. The agencies said they would consider further guidance.

Why the procedural change mattered

Banks can connect digital assets to established payments, custody, compliance and deposit infrastructure. Crypto-specific pre-notification or nonobjection requirements could therefore affect whether a bank tested a product, how long preparation took and how much supervisory uncertainty surrounded a launch. Removing them reduced a distinct procedural layer, although the event-day record supplied no measurement of cost savings, approval times or new bank participation.

The institutional reading is stronger than any market claim. The announcement came after the OCC’s March 7 action and aligned the three federal banking agencies more closely on process. Contemporaneous Reuters coverage characterized the move as a pullback of guardrails adopted under the prior administration. That description is useful context, but the primary documents support a narrower conclusion: four supervisory documents were withdrawn, while ordinary supervision and applicable law remained.

What remained unresolved on April 24

No bank announced a product launch in the Federal Reserve release, and the notice did not define which future crypto activities supervisors would regard as permissible. It also did not create a federal stablecoin statute or guarantee access to banking services for a specific company.

The verifiable April 24 development was consequently a change in supervisory architecture, not proof of adoption. Follow-up evidence would need to come from replacement guidance, bank filings, approvals or actual product launches—each assessed under the rules and facts in force at that later date.