The OCC and Crypto: National Trust Charters, Explained

In eighty-three days the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency took eleven crypto and fintech firms through federal bank chartering, ending a four-year freeze. One has now completed the process. The largest banks in America have hired lawyers to stop the rest. Here is what a trust charter actually is and where the fight stands.

What a national trust bank charter is

A national trust bank is a federally chartered institution limited to trust and fiduciary-type activities, chartered by the OCC under the National Bank Act. It is not a full commercial bank.

What it permits: custody of assets including digital assets, settlement services, fiduciary activities, acting as collateral trustee, and reserve management. What it does not permit: taking deposits or making loans. The commercial appeal is jurisdictional, not functional. A crypto custodian operating under state trust company charters or money transmitter licenses must maintain compliance across dozens of state regimes; a national trust charter replaces that patchwork with a single federal supervisor and national reach. For firms whose customers are institutions, federal supervision is also a sales argument, because a counterparty asking who regulates you receives a better answer.

The OCC has separately confirmed through interpretive guidance that national banks may provide digital asset custody and settlement services, and may act as agents to execute and settle digital asset trades for customers, where done in a safe and sound manner with appropriate risk management and disclosure.

The charter wave, dated

The sequence matters because the pace is the story.

Anchorage Digital received conditional approval in January 2021 and then remained, for four years, the only crypto-native firm to hold one. On December 12, 2025, the agency conditionally approved five applications at once: two de novo entities, Circle’s First National Digital Currency Bank and Ripple National Trust Bank, and three conversions from state trust companies, BitGo Bank and Trust, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos Trust Company. It was the first mass grant of federal trust charters to crypto firms.

February 2026 brought three more conditional approvals: Protego, Stripe’s stablecoin subsidiary Bridge, and Crypto.com’s entity. Applications followed from Morgan Stanley, Payoneer, and Zerohash, with Coinbase and a Trump-family-linked venture also in the queue. Roughly eleven firms received approvals or filed applications within about eighty-three days.

Conditional approval is not the finish line. It permits organization subject to conditions, typically including capital commitments, and the institution must complete the process before operating. Circle’s entity announced final approval on July 10, 2026, making it the first crypto-native firm to complete the journey since Anchorage.

The legal scaffolding, and the challenge

The charters rest on a specific chain of authority, and that chain is what opponents intend to attack.

The foundation is a set of OCC interpretive letters, beginning with the 2021 letter addressing crypto custody and continuing through more recent guidance permitting national banks to execute crypto trades as riskless principal for custody customers. On top of that sits a rule finalized in February 2026 and effective April 1, revising the regulatory description of what a chartered trust bank may do, moving from language centered on fiduciary activities toward trust company operations and related activities. The agency’s position is that the rule neither expands nor contracts its authority.

The Bank Policy Institute, representing roughly forty major lenders including the largest US banks, reads it differently, has retained outside counsel, and is weighing litigation against the chartering practice. Its stated objection is that conditional approvals leave unanswered questions about whether requirements imposed are tailored to the trusts’ actual activities and risks. As of late July 2026 no suit has been filed. Our newsroom has examined the dispute, including the biographical detail that the interpretive groundwork was laid in letters authored by the current Comptroller when he served as the agency’s chief counsel, in a dedicated feature.

The stablecoin wrinkle

One detail confuses readers reasonably, and it is worth stating plainly: a national trust charter is not automatically the vehicle through which a company issues its stablecoin.

Both Circle and Ripple obtained national trust charters while continuing to use New York limited purpose trust arrangements for stablecoin issuance itself, a structure that implies confidence in the state regulator’s ability to certify its regime as substantially similar to the federal stablecoin framework. Fidelity and Paxos took the other route, converting New York state trusts into national charters. The federal stablecoin statute permits both federal and qualifying state paths, and firms are choosing between them on grounds specific to their businesses. Our main regulation page covers that statute’s structure.

What conditional approval actually requires

The distinction between conditional and final approval has been reported loosely, and the gap between them is where several of these charters currently sit.

Conditional approval permits an applicant to organize the institution, subject to conditions the agency imposes in its approval letter. Those conditions typically address capital, with the OCC specifying levels the institution must maintain, and operating agreements governing how the business will be conducted. The institution must then complete organization, satisfy the conditions, and receive final approval before it may open for business. A conditionally approved charter is a permission to build, not a license to operate.

That distinction explains the current landscape. Of the eight crypto firms conditionally approved across December and February, one has announced final approval. The others remain in organization, and how long that takes depends on capital arrangements, systems readiness, personnel, and the agency’s satisfaction that conditions are met. Anchorage Digital’s history is instructive: conditional approval in 2021, and years of operation as the only crypto-native firm to have completed the process, during which it also received a supervisory agreement addressing compliance deficiencies — a reminder that a federal charter brings federal examination.

For readers assessing announcements in this sector, the practical test is simple. A press release announcing OCC approval should be read for which approval it describes. Conditional approval is a meaningful regulatory milestone and it is not authorization to operate as a national bank.

The economics: why firms want this

The commercial case for a trust charter is specific enough to be quantified in principle, and it explains why eleven firms moved within a single quarter.

A crypto custodian or infrastructure business serving American customers nationally must otherwise operate under state money transmitter licenses, state trust company charters, or both, across dozens of jurisdictions. Each carries an application, a surety bond, net worth requirements, examination cycles, reporting obligations, and renewal, and our FinCEN page covers that layered burden in full. The compliance headcount and legal spend required to maintain that patchwork is substantial and grows with the number of states served.

A national trust charter replaces the patchwork with a single federal supervisor and nationwide authority. The direct saving is real, and the indirect benefits are larger. Institutional counterparties conducting diligence receive a simpler answer about who supervises the firm. Federal supervision carries reputational weight that state licensing does not, particularly with banks, asset managers, and corporate treasuries evaluating whether to place assets with a crypto-native provider. And for stablecoin issuers, proximity to the federal banking system matters for reserve custody arrangements, which have historically depended on commercial bank relationships that proved fragile during the regional banking stress of 2023.

The costs are also real and less discussed. Federal chartering brings federal examination, capital requirements, governance expectations, and supervisory attention that state trust regimes often applied more lightly. Firms accustomed to operating with limited regulatory contact discover that a charter is a relationship rather than a certificate. Several of the conditions attached to these approvals address exactly that transition.

The banking-access backdrop

The charter wave is unintelligible without the history it reverses, and that history is recent enough that its participants are still litigating about it.

For most of the preceding decade, crypto firms’ central operational problem was banking access. Accounts were closed or refused, often without explanation, with the industry alleging coordinated regulatory pressure on banks to avoid the sector and regulators maintaining that supervisory guidance addressed genuine risk. Congressional inquiries, document productions, and litigation have followed, and the dispute over what happened and who directed it remains active.

The current posture is a deliberate reversal. Federal banking agencies withdrew or rescinded prior guidance discouraging bank crypto activity, the Federal Reserve ended its dedicated novel activities supervision program and returned crypto banking to standard supervisory channels, and the OCC confirmed through interpretive guidance that national banks may provide digital asset custody and settlement and may act as agents to execute and settle digital asset trades for customers, where conducted safely and soundly.

The chartering wave sits on top of that reversal, and it is the reason the trade group challenge described above carries broader stakes than one licensing practice. If crypto firms obtain federal charters while incumbent banks are simultaneously permitted to enter the same activities, the competitive question becomes whether the two groups face comparable obligations, and the incumbents’ argument is that they do not.

What the charter does not solve

Four limits are worth stating plainly, because charter announcements are frequently read as resolving more than they do.

It is not a banking license. No deposits, no lending, no access to the deposit insurance regime. A national trust bank is a fiduciary and custody institution, and firms wanting full banking powers must pursue a different and considerably harder charter, as at least one firm in this cycle has done.

It does not by itself authorize stablecoin issuance. The federal stablecoin statute contains its own issuer framework with federal and qualifying state paths, and several charter recipients have deliberately kept issuance in state trust entities, as our main regulation page describes.

It does not resolve the securities or commodities question. Whether a given asset is a security or a digital commodity is determined by the market regulators covered on our SEC and CFTC pages, and a trust charter says nothing about it.

It does not guarantee operation. Conditional approval can be followed by protracted organization, and a charter, once operating, brings ongoing supervision with the possibility of supervisory agreements, enforcement, and conditions on growth. The charter is the beginning of a regulatory relationship.

What to watch

Conversions from conditional to final. Seven crypto firms hold conditional approvals without announced final approval. The pace at which those convert is the truest measure of whether this wave produces operating institutions or a queue of permissions, and each conversion is publicly announced.

Whether the trade group sues. No complaint has been filed as of late July 2026. A filing would put the interpretive chain and the April rule before a court, and the outcome would determine whether the charter route remains available to the applicants still in the queue.

The pending applications. Morgan Stanley, Payoneer, Zerohash, Coinbase, and others have applications outstanding. Approvals for large incumbent financial institutions would change the politics of the challenge considerably, since a practice benefiting both crypto natives and incumbent banks is harder to attack as regulatory favoritism.

Supervisory outcomes. The first examination findings, supervisory agreements, or enforcement actions involving a newly chartered crypto trust bank will be the first real evidence of what federal supervision of these institutions looks like in practice, and that evidence matters more for the sector’s long-run standing than any approval announcement.

The interpretive chain, and why it is contested

The charters do not rest on new legislation. They rest on a sequence of agency interpretations built over five years, and understanding that chain is understanding why opponents believe it can be broken.

The foundation is a 2020–2021 series of interpretive letters addressing what national banks may do with digital assets: hold cryptographic keys as custodians, provide related services including exchange facilitation, settlement, recordkeeping, and valuation, and hold reserves associated with stablecoins. Later guidance addressed whether prior notification requirements applied and confirmed that banks may act as riskless principal in crypto asset transactions for custody customers, on the reasoning that doing so is a logical outgrowth of services banks already provide.

On top of that interpretive base sits the regulatory change that opponents treat as decisive: a rule finalized in February 2026 and effective April 1, revising the description in the agency’s chartering regulations of what a chartered trust bank does, moving from language centered on fiduciary activities toward trust company operations and related activities. The agency’s stated position is that the change neither expands nor contracts its authority and simply reflects existing practice.

Critics read that sentence as the load-bearing element of the entire project. Their argument is that a national trust bank charter was designed for institutions conducting fiduciary business, that custody of stablecoin reserves and payments-adjacent services are not fiduciary activities in the traditional sense, and that a rule broadening the descriptive language permits substantial non-fiduciary business inside a limited-purpose charter that Congress never authorized for that use. They also note, as our newsroom’s feature on the dispute records, that the interpretive groundwork was laid in letters authored by the current Comptroller during earlier service as the agency’s chief counsel.

The counterargument is that custody and settlement have always been core banking functions, that the technology of the asset being held does not change the nature of the service, and that the incumbent objection is competitive, not legal. Both positions are arguable, which is why a filed complaint would matter: the interpretive chain has never been tested in court, and its durability is the single largest open question hanging over every charter granted in this cycle.

The applicant board

The clearest way to hold this landscape is as a list, and the composition of that list says more about where American finance is heading than any individual approval.

Operating. Anchorage Digital, conditionally approved January 2021 and the only crypto-native firm to complete the process for four years, joined in July 2026 by Circle’s First National Digital Currency Bank, which announced final approval on July 10.

Conditionally approved, December 12, 2025. Ripple National Trust Bank and Circle’s entity as de novo applicants; BitGo Bank and Trust, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos Trust Company converting from state trust charters. Three of the five, by their own statements at the time, intend stablecoin-related activity.

Conditionally approved, February 2026. Protego, approved early in the month; Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure business Stripe acquired, approved around mid-month; and Crypto.com’s entity, Foris Dax National Trust Bank, approved late in the month roughly four months after applying.

Applications outstanding. Morgan Stanley, filing in February for an entity styled Morgan Stanley Digital Trust; Payoneer, also February; Zerohash, in March; alongside Coinbase and a Trump-family-linked venture.

Two features of that board deserve emphasis. The first is speed: roughly eleven firms received approvals or filed applications inside eighty-three days, with the Crypto.com approval arriving about four months after its application, which is fast by historical chartering standards and is itself part of what the incumbent challenge objects to. The second is composition. This is no longer a crypto-native list. A global investment bank, a cross-border payments company, and a payments infrastructure provider owned by one of the largest private fintechs in the world are all in the queue, which means any challenge to the practice now threatens a coalition considerably broader than the digital asset industry, and any decision on it will be read as a decision about who may enter federal banking generally.