More details are coming about the measures that the current administration took against cryptocurrency-linked businesses and tech founders as part of what has been known as Operation Chokepoint 2.0, a government effort to target crypto businesses operating legally.
During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm with over $42 billion in assets under management (AUM), revealed the extension level of these government measures. Andressen stated that Operation Chokepoint 2.0 was an extension of what the government had applied to legal marihuana businesses and gun manufacturers, preventing them from receiving financial services and pushing them to cash-only operations.
Andreessen remarked:
This administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents. That’s been super pernitious.
He revealed that this operation managed to debank 30 tech founders in the last four years and that this was one of the reasons the firm started supporting Trump. “You can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal firm and then they literally get sanctioned,” he explained, highlighting the absence of due process and the helplessness of the victims of these actions.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, confirmed this was true, qualifying this move as “one of the most unethical and un-American things that happened in the Biden administration” and blaming Senator Elizabeth Warren for these interventions.
Since November, Coinbase has received evidence that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) sent letters to financial institutions to pause or not allow crypto companies to receive banking services. Coinbase CLO Paul Grewal reported that over 20 letters of this kind were found via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, calling this act a “shameful example of a government agency trying to cut off financial access to law-abiding American companies.”
Read more: Shocking Exposure: Coinbase Uncovers 20 Shameful Regulator Moves Against Crypto
Kraken’s CEO Jesse Powell also chimed into the conversation, stating that the exchange had faced difficulties in this area. “Fed Master accounts for new banks perceived to be crypto-friendly have been unlawfully denied. Existing crypto-friendly banks have extrajudicially murdered. This is why we bitcoin,” he concluded.