9th December 2025 > > BPCE & OCC.

tl;dr

BPCE does its bit for the crypto revolution in France, as does the OCC in the US.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Senator Cynthia Lummis has made one of the most bullish predictions for BTC, dwarfing my $1.2mm price target by looking at $10mm per BTC. We will take some of that, no doubt.

Curious Crypto’s Commentary – BPCE

BPCE, a French banking organisation that comprises 25 regional banks with a total of twelve million retail customers, has announced the launch of crypto services – buying, selling, and custody – for BTC, ETH, SOL, and USDC, initially to two million of its clients.

Just another of the inevitable steps being taken to embed cryptos are the heart of the TradFi system, and at the core of all investors’ investment portfolios.

Curious Crypto’s Commentary – OCC

The office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is likely to be one of those bureaucratic bodies that has largely passed most readers by, despite its importance and influence in the banking world. The OCC is responsible for regulating national banks in the US, starting with the approval or otherwise of any applications from an entity that wishes to become a regulated bank.

In recent times, those who believed Operation Choke Point 2.0 to be valid and justifiable, though all evidence is to the contrary, saw the OCC as an obvious means of trying to derail the crypto revolution. Despite the bureaucrats’ best efforts, they had somehow allowed two crypto banks to slip through the net – Anchorage Digital in 2021 and Erebor last October, though the number of applications that were rejected, or were put off from applying in the first place, was far greater.

So far in 2025, given the pro-crypto environment, the OCC has received fourteen applications for new crypto banks. This has obviously been a worry to TradFi, which as a group has tried to block new applications. The American Bankers’ Association claims that allowing firms like Circle and Ripple Labs to become regulated banks “would raise significant policy and process concerns”.

This is of course the tried and tested means of raising barriers of entry to the competition. Regulatory barriers are some of the most effective. Every time you hear anyone making the case for additional regulation, you must always remember that such decisions reduce productivity, slow growth, and make us all poorer by raising the cost of capital. That does not mean to imply that regulations are worthless – they are very important. But one very rarely hears the case for the prosecution of the downside to new regulations, new quangos, and new taxpayer funded bureaucrats.

…

Well, this is one time when we are going to hear that side of the argument.

Jonathan Gould, head of the OCC, has come out fighting on our side:

“There is simply no justification for considering digital assets differently. Additionally, it is important that we do not confine banks, including current national trust banks, to the technologies or businesses of the past.”

Take that you Luddites. Jonathon presses the point, and makes the direction of travel very clear to all:

“Chartering helps ensure that the banking system continues to keep pace with the evolution of finance and supports our modern economy. That is why entities that engage in activities involving digital assets and other novel technologies should have a pathway to become federally supervised banks.”

The regulatory barriers to the wholesale adoption of cryptos continue to collapse, for the benefit of us all.