The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has signaled regulatory movement toward bringing large crypto firms under a national trust bank framework by granting conditional approval for five digital-asset companies to convert to national trust bank charters. The approvals cover Circle, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo, and Fidelity Digital Assets and are explicitly limited in scope: the charters authorize safeguarding customer assets and facilitating transactions, not accepting retail deposits or making loans.

A national trust bank charter shifts custody and settlement activity into a supervised banking vehicle. Practically, that means accepted custodial standards, minimum capital and liquidity thresholds, and routine federal examinations — but also explicit restrictions that prevent these entities from operating as full-service commercial banks. The OCC’s conditional approvals require each firm to meet specific capital, liquidity and compliance requirements and to align operations with new or clarified federal regulatory expectations before charters are finalized. Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/5-major-crypto-companies-just-got-one-step-closer-to-becoming-banks-192157614.html

Why this matters for markets and infrastructure: placing custody and transactional rails inside federally chartered trust banks can reduce counterparty and custody risk for institutional clients by subjecting those functions to bank-grade supervision. It also creates a clearer legal and operational perimeter for how digital assets are held and moved, which can lower frictions for institutions that have been hesitant to custody tokens under nonbank arrangements.

There are trade-offs. Trust bank charters constrain product sets: these firms will be able to custody, settle, and move assets but not expand into deposit-taking or lending without separate authorization. That limitation narrows immediate revenue pathways compared with full bank status, meaning firms will have to rely on transactional, custody, and ancillary services to monetize chartered operations. Compliance and capital requirements could raise entrance costs, favoring larger incumbents and potentially accelerating consolidation in institutional crypto services.

For stablecoin issuers and tokenized-asset projects, the move changes counterparty calculus: a federally supervised custodian can be used to reassure partners and regulators about reserve management and settlement finality. Operationally, expect intensified audits, reporting demands, and a push to harden liquidity buffers and reconciliation processes to satisfy OCC examiners.

The conditional nature of these approvals preserves a runway for the OCC and other federal regulators to enforce implementation standards before full bank-like supervision takes effect; firms must satisfy capital, liquidity and compliance milestones and pass ongoing examinations to convert successfully.