November 19, 2025
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave banks a crypto nudge and more Solana ETFs went live.
Welcome to the Meridian Update. The price of Bitcoin fell below $90,000 again, so Cameron Winklevoss was wrong. Let’s dive in.
People want to buy on-chain assets off-chain (part n)
More. Solana. Exchange-traded products (ETPs). Why not!
“Fidelity, one of the world's biggest asset managers, has joined others in launching a Solana exchange-traded fund, which includes a staking feature.”
Fidelity is indeed one of the world’s biggest asset managers. In 2025, they’ve leaned into crypto more than we would’ve predicted at the beginning of the year. Of course, that’s mostly because we don’t do predictions. But that’s beside the point. We wouldn’t have predicted Fidelity’s crypto moves. We wrote about the other recent move at the end of October. That was Fidelity making SOL, the native token of the Solana network, available to trade from Fidelity brokerage accounts.
Fidelity is a big name. They’re not the first to launch an ETF that allows people to get exposure to SOL off-chain, as you know. But they’re almost certainly the one the most investors have heard of. No offense to Bitwise, Grayscale, Van Eck…who else are we missing, it’s getting hard to keep track of all these SOL ETFs.
Anyway, Canary Capital also launched their SOL ETF yesterday, as did VanEck the day before.
More crypto regulatory clarity for banks
We last discussed the esteemed US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on November 12th. Can’t believe it’s already been a week.
You already know what the OCC does, of course, but as a quick refresher:
“The OCC ensures that national banks and federal savings associations operate in a safe and sound manner, provide fair access to financial services, treat customers fairly, and comply with applicable laws and regulations.”
Back on November 12th, we talked about how the OCC’s Interpretive Letter 1183 helped SoFi, a bank, bring crypto trading to its platform. At least, that’s what the SoFi CEO said.
A natural takeaway from that coverage was that OCC interpretive letters matter for the on-chain world. They can make banks feel more, or less, confident about bringing on-chain capabilities, assets, and more to their customers. As a quick aside: if not for ChatGPT, we would have used an em dash around “or less.” Rest in peace to the em dash.
Anyway, the OCC published Interpretive Letter 1186 yesterday. It made absolutely clear that national banks are permitted to pay gas fees and hold on-chain assets necessary to pay those gas fees, so long as they are doing so to carry out an otherwise permitted activity. It turns out this is the first time we’ve ever written “gas fees” in the Meridian Update. But for those who don’t know, these are kind of like toll fees. In order to travel, or more accurately transact, on a blockchain network, a user pays the network’s fee. On networks like Solana, which can handle many transactions, the gas fees are low or, to most, de minimis. This is not the case for the Ethereum network, where gas fees have been a historical complaint.
And now national banks can pay gas fees and still sleep at night! How about that?
That’s a wrap
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave banks a crypto nudge and more Solana ETFs went live. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.
Think we missed something today? Send us a note: email@meridianupdate.com.