In brief
- JPMorgan has closed Strike CEO Jack Mallers’ accounts, citing “concerning activity,” but refuses to provide details.
- The closure comes despite Trump’s August executive order explicitly prohibiting the debanking of crypto-related initiatives.
- “Trying to choke off crypto won’t make it go away, it’ll just push it to thrive elsewhere and leave the US behind,” an expert told Decrypt.
Banking giant JPMorgan Chase abruptly closed the bank accounts of Strike CEO Jack Mallers in September, resurfacing concerns about debanking practices toward crypto executives.
“Last month, J.P. Morgan Chase threw me out of the bank,” the Bitcoin-focused payments firm’s CEO tweeted Sunday. “It was bizarre. My dad has been a private client there for 30+ years. Every time I asked them why, they said the same thing: ‘We aren’t allowed to tell you’.”
The letter from Chase cited “concerning activity” identified during routine monitoring but provided no specific details, stating the bank is “committed to regulatory compliance and ensuring the security and integrity of the financial system.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in August prohibiting debanking of crypto-related initiatives, with the bank’s actions raising questions about whether “Operation Chokepoint 2.0,” the alleged Biden-era campaign to deny banking services to crypto companies, truly ended.
Following Mallers’ revelation, Bo Hines, who previously headed Trump’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets and now serves as Tether’s Strategic Advisor, called out the bank, “Hey Chase… you guys know Operation Choke Point is over, right? Just checking.”
Trump has previously acknowledged debanking’s persistence in June, telling Decrypt, “I can tell you, because I’ve been a victim myself because of my politics, that big banks were very nasty to us.”
Eric Trump, the son of President Donald Trump, also revealed in May that “some of the biggest banks in the world” canceled accounts for him and family members at the end of Trump’s first term, which he said drove their embrace of crypto.
The letter Mallers shared also cites the Bank Secrecy Act and says the bank “may not be able to open new accounts for you in the future.”
During a Yahoo Finance interview last year, Mallers had dismissed JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s Bitcoin criticism, saying, “What do I think about Jeffrey Epstein’s banker being concerned that a distributed, decentralized, open public money could potentially be used for bad things, sitting on a ski resort in Davos? I don’t really care.”
What is Debanking?
Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is the term crypto industry leaders use to describe what they allege was a coordinated effort during the Biden administration where federal banking regulators pressured financial institutions to deny services to crypto companies and executives.
The name references the original Operation Choke Point, a controversial Obama-era Department of Justice initiative that discouraged banks from doing business with industries it deemed high-risk, including payday lenders and firearms dealers.
“Trying to choke off crypto won’t make it go away, it’ll just push it to thrive elsewhere and leave the US behind,” Fireblocks’ Chief Legal and Compliance Officer, Jason Allegrante, told Decrypt.
He also cautioned that delegating such decisions to regulators leaves “major questions about who can access the US financial system” and “undermines the democratic rule of law for everyone.
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