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Trading app Robinhood said Thursday that it plans to “allow limited buys” of stocks like GameStop on Friday, a development that comes hours after it moved to halt purchases.

Robinhood’s initial move sparked fury across social media — as well as the Reddit-based users affected by the operational change. It triggered at least one class-action lawsuit and drew the attention of members of Congress. Earlier Friday, Sen. Sherrod Brown announced that the Senate Banking Committee, which Brown is set to chair, will conduct a hearing into the situation at some point in the future.

“Starting tomorrow, we plan to allow limited buys of these securities. We’ll continue to monitor the situation and may make adjustments as needed,” Robinhood said. “To be clear, this was a risk-management decision, and was not made on the direction of the market makers we route to. We’re beginning to open up trading for some of these securities in a responsible manner.”

“We’ll keep monitoring market conditions as we look to restore full trading for these securities,” the firm said in its post.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has announced that it put a hold on formally publishing a rule that seeks to push banks to provide fairer access to services.

According to the Thursday announcement, pausing publication of the rule will allow the next Comptroller of the Currency to review it and take into consideration any public comments the OCC has received. Recent reports suggest that former Treasury Department official Michael Barr, who worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations, may be nominated to lead the U.S. banking regulator.

The agency went public with the rule in November 2020. According to the US banking regulator’s statement at the time, the OCC’s stated position was that “banks should provide access to services, capital, and credit based on the risk assessment of individual customers, rather than broad-based decisions affecting whole categories or classes of customers.” 

The primary goal of the proposal is to stop banks from limiting the access customers or businesses have to banking services. Under the new rule, banks would be required to make their services available to everyone in the communities they serve. However, they can still choose to deny specific services based on a customer’s creditworthiness, ability to pay, and other factors. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

An application aiming to be the decentralized finance (DeFi) system’s all-in-one trading platform has launched, and it’s already gotten a seal of approval from a number of crypto’s biggest venture capital firms.

Polychain Capital led Parsec’s $1.25 million funding round, with participation from Robot Ventures, Volt Capital, Free Company as well as Eric Conner, Alex Pack and Will Price. Details of the round were included in a Medium post penned by founder Will Sheehan and published Thursday.

Before this seed round, Parsec had raised a small pre-seed from Polychain’s incubator program.

The seed funding will allow Parsec to layer “complimentary services” on top of its flagship product: an interface that aggregates 30 information components and in-app trading.

“The funds will be used to build a world-class team to achieve our lofty goals,” he told The Block in an email. 

Parsec’s app represents an attempt to craft an experience in DeFi “similar to that of a professional brokerage account without the friction of custody,” according to Sheehan.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Coinbase has made official its plan to go public by way of a direct listing, according to a blog post released Thursday by the U.S.-based crypto exchange.

“Coinbase Global, Inc. today announced its intent to become a publicly-traded company pursuant to a proposed direct listing of its Class A common stock. Such proposed listing is expected to be pursuant to a registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”),” Coinbase wrote in the blog post.

Coinbase announced in mid-December that it filed a confidential S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 

“The Form S-1 is expected to become effective after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions,” Coinbase said Thursday.

As The Block previously reported this month, Coinbase told shareholders that it would launch a secondary market for its private stock on Nasdaq Private Market.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.