Caitlin Long slams JD Vance over 'Dead' Choke Point 2.0 claim originally appeared on TheStreet .
Vice President JD Vance may have fired up the crowd at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, but Caitlin Long isn’t buying it.
Hours after Vance declared that “Operation Choke Point 2.0 is dead, and it's not coming back under the Trump administration,” Long — the CEO of Custodia Bank and longtime crypto policy advocate — took to X to say that’s simply not true.
Related: Live: Vice President JD Vance delivers powerful remarks at Bitcoin Conference
“I'm sorry to report what you said isn't true JD Vance: ‘Operation Choke Point 2.0 is dead & it's not coming back under the Trump Administration.’ Until the Fed rescinds its Jan 27, 2023 regulation (still in place) & its non-public debanking tools are gone, it's not over,” she wrote.
Long didn’t stop there. In another post, she referenced Vance’s vow to “fire everybody like [Gary Gensler],” by pointing out that several financial regulators with anti-crypto leanings still remain in power.
“The list of Warrenites still in power at federal financial regulators is long,” she said, adding that she’d been asked to resubmit it to a top Hill legislator just the day before. “When is action going to be taken JD Vance??”
The remarks from Vance were part of a broad, pro-Bitcoin speech that praised crypto as “genuine ground-up innovation” and promised the industry now had “a champion and an ally in the White House.” He credited Trump’s victory in part to support from the crypto community and called the GENIUS Act a transformative bill that would “vastly expand the use of stablecoins” while “strengthening the American dollar.”
But to Long and other industry insiders, the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality.
“Operation Choke Point 2.0 is not over yet,” she said. “I don't know if JD Vance isn't aware or was overstating, but let's hope he gets this message & gets to work on ending it.”
Vance's team hasn’t responded publicly to Long’s posts.
What is Operation Choke Point 2.0?
Operation Choke Point 2.0 is a term used by the crypto industry to describe what they see as a covert effort by U.S. regulators to cut off digital asset companies from the banking system. While not an official program, it draws its name from the original Operation Choke Point, a 2013 Department of Justice initiative that pressured banks to stop servicing "high-risk" but legal industries like gun dealers and payday lenders. That program was shut down in 2017 after public backlash, but crypto leaders say a new version has quietly taken its place.
The “2.0” version is believed to have started around late 2022, when multiple U.S. banking regulators began warning financial institutions about the risks of working with crypto firms. Around the same time, major crypto-friendly banks like Silvergate, Signature, and Silicon Valley Bank either collapsed or were shut down under circumstances that critics say were suspicious.
Caitlin Long slams JD Vance over 'Dead' Choke Point 2.0 claim first appeared on TheStreet on May 28, 2025
This story was originally reported by TheStreet on May 28, 2025, where it first appeared.