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OCC Chief Brian Brooks Is Stepping Down Thursday
Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks will be stepping down on Jan. 14, he confirmed Wednesday.
By Nikhilesh De
Updated Dec 10, 2022, 3:00 p.m. Published Jan 13, 2021, 11:01 p.m.
Brian Brooks, who was named the acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) last summer, made it official a day after he was rumored to be departing.
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His departure will come a day after the federal banking regulator granted crypto custodian Anchorage a conditional trust charter, making it the first crypto-native national bank.
“It has been a great honor to serve the United States as Acting Comptroller of the Currency,” Brooks said in an emailed statement through a spokesperson. “The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is the most extraordinary of federal agencies filled with the most dedicated, professional and gifted staff any executive can hope to have. I am extremely proud of what we have accomplished together through what have been extraordinary times by any measure.”
Under Brooks, the OCC published a number of interpretative letters surrounding how national banks can interact with the cryptocurrency space, with particular attention paid to stablecoins and their issuers. However, he said during a public seminar hosted by analysis firm Elliptic that much of this work began prior to his arrival at the agency last March.
The former chief legal officer at Coinbase has said multiple times he believes digital assets and blockchain technology can form the basis for the future of the financial system, a view he reiterated during the seminar.
"Blockchains, fundamentally, are banking because what they’re doing is allowing the transaction of value across networks … they’re doing it in an orthogonally different way," he said Wednesday in what may be his swan song in public office.
It is unclear who the incoming president, Joe Biden, might tap to replace Brooks. The OCC announced Chief Operating Officer Blake Paulson will become the new acting comptroller in the interim. Law firm Davis Polk said in a public presentationhttps://www.davispolk.com/sites/default/files/the_road_ahead_for_financial_regulatory_reform_in_a_time_of_democrats_in_control.pdf Wednesday that it is unlikely Brooks' efforts around digital asset custody will be overturned by his successor, though further efforts around digital currencies may be slowed.
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- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
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What to know:
- Custodia Bank has filed a petition for a rehearing en banc with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in its legal battle against the Federal Reserve.
- The bank argues that the Fed's denial of a master account undermines state banking authority and raises constitutional concerns.
- The October ruling against Custodia is a significant setback in its efforts to gain access to the U.S. payments system.
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