U.S. national banks have been told by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that they’ll no longer have to answer how controversial customers might damage their reputations — a point that had been criticized by crypto companies and insiders arguing that it contributed to them being debanked.

The OCC is removing that factor from its supervision handbook, the agency said in a Thursday statement.

“The OCC’s examination process has always been rooted in ensuring appropriate risk management processes for bank activities, not casting judgment on how a particular activity may fare with public opinion,” said Acting Comptroller of the Currency Rodney Hood.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had made a similar commitment in a congressional hearing last month that the Fed would cut that category of scrutiny from its internal supervision manuals.

The OCC has been making moves to ease the compliance path for banks engaging in crypto business. It recently erased earlier guidance that had called for banks to get pre-approval in writing from the agency if they wanted to handle digital assets business lines.

The banking regulator may soon have its permanent chief, with President Donald Trump’s nominee, Jonathan Gould, facing a Senate confirmation hearing next week. The head of the OCC tends to be able to act more quickly and decisively than other financial regulators, because the person operates as the sole authority without a commission or board to seek approval from.

Paul Atkins, the nominee to take over the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is set for a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing next week, putting President Donald Trump’s pick for the SEC chairmanship on track to start working as soon as next month.

At the same March 27 hearing, the Senate panel is also weighing the nomination of Jonathan Gould to take over the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees U.S. national banks — a key area of interest for crypto firms that have fought a long battle for banking access, the Senate Banking Committee announced in an email Thursday.

Atkins is a former commission of the SEC and a digital assets advocate who ran a Washington firm advising clients on financial compliance issues. He’s expected to carry on the SEC’s pro-crypto momentum that began after Trump returned to the White House and appointed Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda.

The OCC will not only be a key agency for opening digital asset sector access to U.S. banking, but it may also be a regulator for future stablecoin issuers, according to current legislative efforts.

The panel will also consider Luke Pettit’s nomination to be the assistant secretary for the Treasury during Thursday’s session.

Trump nominated Atkins to succeed former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, whose actions heading up the securities regulator drew accusations of «regulation by enforcement» from the crypto industry. Uyeda has changed his predecessor’s approach since taking over the agency on a provisional basis, withdrawing from several lawsuits the SEC filed against crypto firms in past years and pausing others. The SEC has also told a number of crypto companies that it was closing investigations into these firms.

Proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining does not trigger federal securities laws, according to a Thursday staff statement from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which told mining operators they do not need to register their transactions with the regulator.

The statement, published by the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, declared that both solo proof-of-work crypto mining and pooled proof-of-work crypto mining do not meet the definition of a securities transaction under the Howey Test — the legal framework used to determine whether a transaction represents an investment contract — because they are “not undertaken with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others.”

The statement puts to rest any lingering fears that the SEC’s enforcement division could turn its gaze on proof-of-work crypto miners. Though the agency, under the leadership of former Chair Gary Gensler, begrudgingly admitted that bitcoin was a commodity rather than a security, the agency’s enforcement suit against Utah-based Green United, an alleged ponzi scheme accused of defrauding customers in a cloud mining scheme, prompted concerns among some in the industry that the agency would eventually crack down on legitimate crypto miners.

The SEC said that Thursday’s statement is “part of an effort to provide greater clarity on the application of the federal securities laws to crypto assets” — something the industry has been pushing for for years. Under the new leadership of Acting Chair Mark Uyeda, who established a Crypto Task Force spearheaded by crypto-friendly Commissioner Hester Peirce, the agency has rapidly begun reversing course on its approach to crypto, dropping lawsuits and investigations started under Gensler and repealing the controversial Staff Accounting Bulletin 121.

Thursday’s staff statement comes shortly after the SEC put out a similar staff statement in February declaring most memecoins to be outside the regulator’s jurisdiction.

Read more: As Congress Talks Up Its Earth-Shaking Bill, Regulators Are Already at Work

Under its new leadership, the SEC has signaled a much greater willingness to work with the crypto industry to craft better, clearer regulations moving forward. On Friday, the agency will host a roundtable discussion on what makes a cryptocurrency a security – the first in a series of roundtable discussions between the regulator and industry participants.