Eleven companies filed for or received Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) national trust bank charters in 83 days between December 12, 2025, and March 4, 2026. On April 1, 2026, the OCC's final rule amending 12 CFR 5.20 took effect, replacing the term "fiduciary activities" with "ope...
"The OCC welcomes applicants for bank charters. Their renewed interest is a return to the norm and a sign of a healthy banking system." — Jonathan Gould, Comptroller of the Currency
Eleven companies filed for or received Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) national trust bank charters in 83 days between December 12, 2025, and March 4, 2026. On April 1, 2026, the OCC's final rule amending 12 CFR 5.20 took effect, replacing the term "fiduciary activities" with "operations of a trust company and activities related thereto" — formally confirming that nationally chartered trust banks may conduct non-fiduciary custody and safekeeping as core functions. The amendment removes a textual ambiguity that had persisted since the National Bank Act of 1864.
The applicant list spans crypto-native firms (Ripple, Circle, BitGo, Paxos, Crypto.com), legacy financial institutions (Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Digital Assets), and infrastructure companies (Zerohash, Bridge/Stripe, Protego, Payoneer). This is not a crypto story. It is a contest over who controls the custody, settlement, and fiduciary plumbing of a digital asset market projected to reach $7.7 billion in custodial revenue by 2032, according to 360iResearch. The Bank Policy Institute — whose board includes the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America — is weighing litigation to stop it.
The OCC filed its regulatory amendment on February 27, 2026. The Federal Register published the final rule on March 2. It became effective April 1, 2026.
The change is narrow but consequential. The previous text of 12 CFR 5.20(e)(1)(i) permitted national trust banks to engage in "fiduciary activities." The revised text replaces this with "the operations of a trust company and activities related thereto," aligning the regulation with the statutory language of 12 U.S.C. § 27(a). The OCC stated it had never interpreted the prior text as restricting trust banks to fiduciary activities alone, but the ambiguity in the regulatory language created legal uncertainty — particularly for digital asset firms seeking to operate custody as a primary, non-fiduciary business function.
The OCC finalized the rule without substantive changes from its January 8, 2026, proposal. It rejected calls from industry groups for a moratorium on charter applications and confirmed it would evaluate permissible activities on a case-by-case basis.
Approximately 60 national trust banks currently operate under OCC supervision. According to OCC data, existing national trust banks hold nearly $2 trillion in custody accounts.
The charter wave began December 12, 2025, when the OCC announced conditional approvals for five firms simultaneously:
| Company | Entity Name | Status | |---------|-------------|--------| | Ripple | Ripple National Trust Bank | Conditional (Dec. 12, 2025) | | Circle | First National Digital Currency Bank | Conditional (Dec. 12, 2025) | | BitGo | BitGo Bank & Trust (conversion) | Conditional (Dec. 12, 2025) | | Paxos | Paxos Trust Co. (conversion) | Conditional (Dec. 12, 2025) | | Fidelity Digital Assets | Charter conversion | Conditional (Dec. 12, 2025) | | Bridge (Stripe) | — | Conditional (~Feb. 12, 2026) | | Protego | — | Conditional (early Feb. 2026) | | Crypto.com | — | Conditional (Feb. 23, 2026) | | Morgan Stanley | Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, N.A. | Filed (Feb. 18, 2026) | | Payoneer | — | Filed (Feb. 24, 2026) | | Zerohash | — | Filed (March 4, 2026) |
Additional applications from Coinbase and World Liberty Financial were pending as of late March 2026.
For context, Anchorage Digital Bank — which received its conditional charter in January 2021 — remains the only crypto-native firm to have completed the full conditional-to-operational transition. In February 2026, Tether invested $100 million in Anchorage Digital, valuing the company at $4.2 billion.
Four of the five December 2025 approvals — BitGo (USDS), Circle (USDC), Paxos (PYUSD), and Ripple (RLUSD) — are stablecoin issuers. The national trust bank charter permits these firms to custody their own stablecoin reserves rather than outsourcing to third-party OCC-approved custodians, reducing counterparty risk and potentially improving reserve yield management. Standard Chartered analysts estimated that yield provisions under these structures could redirect up to $1 trillion in deposits to stablecoin products by 2028.
Morgan Stanley filed its charter application on February 18, 2026, proposing an entity called Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, National Association. The filing signals intent to control the custody, settlement, and fiduciary layer of institutional digital asset management under federal bank supervision.
The proposed trust bank would provide custody for digital assets, support client investment through purchase, sale, swap, and transfer of tokens, and facilitate fiduciary staking. This is distinct from the firm's parallel plan to launch retail crypto spot trading (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana) through E*Trade in H1 2026.
According to PYMNTS, the competition is "not for trading volume but for control of what might be called the 'digital asset back office'" — the clearinghouse and custodial functions that generate steady, recurring revenue regardless of token price movements.
Zerohash filed its OCC application on March 4, 2026, adding a federal charter bid to an existing set of credentials: a North Carolina trust company charter (granted March 2025, operational September 2025), FinCEN registration as a money services business, and money transmitter licenses across 51 U.S. jurisdictions.
The company serves over five million end users across 190 countries. Its client list includes Interactive Brokers, Stripe, BlackRock's BUIDL Fund, Franklin Templeton, DraftKings, Kalshi, Lightspark, and Tastytrade. Morgan Stanley participated in Zerohash's September 2025 Series D-2 funding round ($104 million at a $1 billion valuation) alongside Interactive Brokers (lead investor), SoFi, Apollo-managed funds, and Jump Crypto. By January 2026, the company was in funding discussions at a $1.5 billion valuation. Mastercard had pursued acquisition talks in October 2025 at up to $2 billion; Zerohash declined.
CEO Edward Woodford has described the company as "building the Amazon Web Services of on-chain infrastructure." A national trust charter would place Zerohash's settlement and custody operations under the same federal supervisory framework as the Wall Street institutions it already serves as a back-end provider.
On March 4, 2026, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City approved a limited-purpose master account for Kraken Financial — the Wyoming-chartered Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI) subsidiary of Kraken. It was the first time in U.S. history a cryptocurrency firm received direct access to the Federal Reserve's core payment infrastructure.
Kraken Financial operates on a full-reserve model, maintaining liquid assets equal to or exceeding 100% of client fiat deposits. The account provides direct access to Fedwire, the interbank payment network that processes trillions of dollars in transfers daily, eliminating Kraken's dependency on correspondent banks for dollar settlement.
The approval is constrained. The account is initially for a one-year term. Kraken Financial will not earn interest on reserve balances and will not have access to discount window facilities. Federal Reserve Governor Chris Waller has separately stated he is "exploring a streamlined account structure for newly chartered entities," but no formal framework for broader crypto-firm access to Fed payment rails exists.
Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward (Kraken's parent), described the approval as marking "the convergence of crypto infrastructure and sovereign payment systems."
The distinction matters: an OCC national trust bank charter does not automatically grant access to the Federal Reserve payment system. Kraken's breakthrough came through its separate Wyoming SPDI charter, not through the OCC trust bank pathway. The other eleven OCC applicants would still require independent Fed approval for payment rail access.
The Bank Policy Institute (BPI), a trade group whose board includes JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, is weighing a lawsuit against the OCC over the charter approvals. As of March 2026, BPI had not made a final litigation decision, according to reporting by The Block.
BPI's position: granting national trust bank charters to crypto firms allows them to offer bank-like services under a lighter regulatory framework than that imposed on full-service national banks. In an October 2025 statement, the group urged the OCC to reject applications from crypto companies, arguing the approvals would weaken regulatory safeguards.
The Conference of State Banking Supervisors (CSBS) has mounted a parallel challenge. CSBS President Brandon Milhorn described the charter structure as a "Franken-charter" — assembled from regulatory components not originally designed to function together. The CSBS sent a formal letter to the OCC arguing that granting federal approval to crypto and payment firms may place them outside "core federal banking laws," weakening market safeguards.
Senator Elizabeth Warren separately pressed Comptroller Gould on the World Liberty Financial application, citing concerns about Trump family ties. At a February 26, 2026, Senate hearing, Gould stated he would consider Warren's request to review the application.
The national trust bank charter offers a federal regulatory framework, OCC supervision, and nationwide operating authority without the need for state-by-state licensing. It permits custody, safekeeping, settlement, payments, asset administration, and stablecoin reserve management.
It does not provide:
The economic value generated by these charters flows primarily through custody fees, settlement fees, stablecoin reserve yield, and fiduciary service charges — not through the net interest margin that drives traditional bank profitability. This is a fundamentally different business model: revenue scales with assets under custody and transaction volume, not with the interest rate spread on a lending book.
The 83-day charter sprint has restructured the competitive landscape for digital asset custody and settlement in the United States. The contest is not over which tokens succeed or fail — it is over who controls the institutional plumbing that holds, moves, and settles them. That plumbing now sits squarely within the federal banking regulatory perimeter, with the OCC as gatekeeper.
Two structural risks remain unresolved. First, the BPI litigation threat introduces regulatory uncertainty that could slow or reverse the charter pipeline. Second, the absence of a clear framework for Fed payment rail access means most chartered firms will continue to depend on correspondent banking relationships for dollar settlement — the same intermediary layer the charters are ostensibly designed to circumvent.
The path from conditional approval to full operational status remains slow: Anchorage Digital took years to complete it. Whether the eleven new entrants — or their Wall Street backers — can compress that timeline will determine whether the OCC's charter framework becomes the dominant regulatory structure for digital asset infrastructure or an intermediate step toward something else entirely.