Welcome back from the Thanksgiving holiday. The Senate Agriculture Committee held a nomination hearing for Michael Selig, who is currently chief counsel for the SEC Crypto Task Force, to become the CFTC Chair. The OCC issued Interpretive Letter 1186 confirming that, as part of the “business of banking,” national banks may hold and use crypto assets as principal to pay network gas fees on blockchain networks required to conduct otherwise permissible activities and to test crypto-asset platforms, whether internally built or provided by third parties.
In Congress, the “Bitcoin for America Act” was introduced to permit Americans to pay federal taxes in bitcoin, with payments directed to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Additionally, House leaders continued efforts to include a central bank digital currency (CBDC) ban in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), lawmakers urged the Treasury and the IRS to revisit guidance on the taxation of staking rewards and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) added a new project to clarify accounting for certain crypto-asset transfers, including wrapped and receipt tokens.
