New York Magazine Finds Evidence of Operation Choke Point 2.0

The Breakdown
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Automatic TRANSCRIPT

Let's shift to our story today, and it is a bombshell. Last night, gen Vietnam from New York magazine dropped a story all about operation choke .2. And while some have commented that they were surprised that this particular piece appeared in New York magazine, they clearly haven't been following Jen. Jen has been covering crypto for more than 6 years now for numerous publications and has a very good read on the industry. She also went to northwestern as an undergrad, so obviously, you know, she has game. Anyway, we'll come back to Jen's story in a moment, but we have to move a bit farther back. I don't think that any of you listening to the show right now won't be familiar with the idea of operation choke .2. Operation choke point was an Obama era program that basically used political pressure to block unwanted or unloved industries out of banking access. So it was things like payday loans or gambling or pornography, right? That program was eventually halted during the Trump administration, but the seeds of it clearly remained. In fact, one of the people in charge of architecting operation choke .1 would go on to become the head of the FDIC under Biden. There has been a strong suspicion among the crypto crowd that ever since the collapse of FTX, there has been a largely coordinated push to block out legal crypto businesses from having access to the banking industry. It has at times seemed very transparent and has at other times just been reflected in what feels like impossible to ignore coordinated actions. Well, trying to get a little bit more information about how real this thing is. On March 16th, Jake stravinsky, the chief policy officer at the blockchain association, wrote today, blockchain association sent freedom of information act request to the fed, FDIC, and OCC demanding information about the unlawful de banking of crypto companies. We're also collecting evidence of de banking. Here's the situation. There are troubling reports of crypto companies having their bank accounts closed, often with no notice and no explanation. They've struggled to open new accounts, too. This disturbing trend suggests that regulators are trying to cut crypto entirely out of the banking system.

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