The revelation that 75% of crypto hedge funds face challenges like access to basic banking services has stirred Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal.
He went to X to demand answers following the release of results from the Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA) survey, which looked into this situation.
Crypto Market is the Target of Debanking
Traditional alternative investment managers like real estate did not experience this same trouble with the banks.
Notably, AIMA discovered this after surveying 20 other alternative investors who were not dealing with cryptocurrencies. None of them had issues while receiving basic banking services.
AIMA has made an action call, asking for a collaborative effort to stop this challenge the crypto industry faces. The association thinks that working closely with the incoming Donald Trump administration will serve as a solution. Already, Trump demonstrated his animosity towards this anti-crypto sentiment during his campaign.
AIMA Survey Report Supports Operation Chokepoint 2.0
The AIMA survey report gives credence to Operation Choke Point 2.0 and the redacted documents published by Coinbase in its case with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
It furnishes them with new statistical grounds. For context, Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is a debanking campaign allegedly targeted at the digital assets industry.
US regulators wrote to banks discouraging them from using banking services to access crypto-related firms. The end game of this move is to suppress the crypto industry in the United States.
Coinbase Seeks FDIC Pause Letters
Coinbase has been pursuing this matter, seeking documents that prove to the court and the public that the FDIC made such requests of banks. In the process, the American cryptocurrency exchange came across some redacted “pause letters,” showing efforts of the FDIC to restrict crypto banking services.
Noteworthy, the letters were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Each “pause letter” explicitly instructed banks to suspend crypto asset-related activities. They were also heavily redacted, preventing Coinbase from accessing a few other pieces of information.
According to Grewal, “The letters that show Operation Chokepoint 2.0 wasn’t just some crypto conspiracy theory. FDIC is still hiding behind way overbroad redactions. And they still haven’t produced more than a fraction of them.”
