How ‘debanking’ became a top priority for tech’s right-wing elite
The allegation is that banks, under pressure from the Biden administration, have unfairly “debanked” people who work with cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin were conceived as a way to challenge traditional banks. Now, with the help of the tech billionaires Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, the crypto industry is fighting for something else entirely: the right to have a checking account.
Musk and Andreessen are some of the prominent and powerful voices trying to make a case that crypto industry players are being wrongly discriminated against when they try to work with big corporate banks. The allegation is that banks, under pressure from the Biden administration, have unfairly “debanked” people who work with cryptocurrency by terminating their bank accounts.
The concept of “debanking,” a previously obscure term, has received fresh attention in the past month after Andreessen, an investor and co-founder of Netscape, said in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan that he knows 30 tech company founders who had been “debanked in the past four years” — a claim that set off a flood of anecdotes from social media users complaining that they, too, had lost access to their bank accounts.
Musk said on X that debanking is an example of “how evil the government has been” and that it should be a federal crime if it’s politically motivated.
It’s an allegation that various federal regulatory agencies reject as untrue. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which charters and supervises all national banks, said that it expects banks to assess the risks of their customers on a case-by-case basis.
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