Acting Comptroller Brian Brooks, speaking on a podcast recently, said banks in the U.S. were exploring ways to adopt crypto after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) made a decision over the summer letting banks provide custody of crypto.
According to CoinDesk, Brooks, speaking on Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast, said the options available could include partnering with or purchasing custodians.
“Well, what I have heard…a number of big crypto custodians like Anchorage, Coinbase, and a number of others, have been contacted by banks about whether they’d be willing to be like the third-party custody providers for national banks whose customers want to invest in bitcoin,” he said, according to CoinDesk.
The Indian cryptocurrency market is continuing to grow exponentially as crypto-centric bank UNICAS prepares to open with 34 branches, Cointelegraph writes.
The bank will expand to over 100 by next year, according to the report. UNICAS is a project of U.K. FinTech Cashaa in collaboration with India’s United Multistate Credit Cooperative Society.
Crypto exchanges are reporting seeing traffic increases from five to 10 percent in India, while local crypto exchanges have seen a tenfold increase in registrations in 2020.
However, the lack of a clear government framework on how crypto can operate may hold things back even now, Cointelegraph reports.
Crypto trading platform INX is moving ahead with its acquisition of digital securities trading firm Openfinance, a company blog post states.
INX says it plans to incorporate the company into its own operations as quickly as possible, and with their combined security tokens, they “believe we will have the greatest number of security tokens listed by any platform in this space,” the blog says.
In addition, INX’s tokens will be added to the mix, adding a security token that can be traded both by accredited investors as well as the general public from the outset, the blog says.
Sweden’s Gazprombank will now offer the sale of custody cryptocurrencies, along with trading between crypto and fiat currencies to its corporate and institutional clients, a press release says.
The new solution will incorporate the purchase and sale of bitcoin alongside industrial-grade storage solutions. The release says clients will have access to cryptocurrency liquidity, while the currencies will be kept safe by Gazprombank.