Federal Reserve Replaces a 2023 Policy That Constrained Banks' Innovative Activities
The Federal Reserve withdrew its 2023 Section 9(13) policy statement and replaced it with a framework intended to give insured and uninsured state member banks a pathway to engage in innovative activities. The discarded policy had been part of the Fed's restrictive post-2022 approach to bank crypto activity.
On December 17, 2025, the Federal Reserve Board withdrew a 2023 policy statement governing activities of state member banks and replaced it with a new Section 9(13) policy designed to provide a pathway for both insured and uninsured state member banks to engage in certain innovative activities. The Board said its understanding of novel financial activities and their risks had evolved and that the old policy was no longer appropriate.
The 2023 framework had been part of the Federal Reserve's broader response to crypto-related banking risks after the failures and market disruptions of 2022. It generally presumed that state member banks would face the same activity limitations applied to national banks and specifically discussed crypto-asset activities in its accompanying material. By 2025, the Fed had already withdrawn several crypto-specific supervisory letters and ended its separate novel-activities supervision program.
The December action removed another element of that earlier restrictive architecture. Staff explicitly described the 2023 policy as part of a series of 2022–2023 issuances related to crypto-asset activities. The new statement maintained safety-and-soundness oversight but signaled a different approach to how the Board would exercise discretion over innovative activities. Governor Michael Barr dissented, warning that the change could encourage regulatory arbitrage and weaken the earlier level-playing-field principle.
The event was not a Bitcoin-specific authorization and did not itself approve a bank Bitcoin product. Its Bitcoin significance came through the banking environment surrounding custody, trading, settlement, and other crypto services. In the context of the OCC's contemporaneous expansion of permissible crypto activity, the Fed's action documented a broader 2025 shift in U.S. bank regulation away from exceptional crypto restrictions and toward supervision through ordinary banking frameworks.