Crypto.com wins conditional OCC approval for national trust bank charter

Crypto.com has been granted conditional consent by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to advance toward a federally chartered national trust bank, a regulatory step that would enable the firm to provide federally supervised digital asset custody and staking services from within the U.S. banking perimeter.

The OCC’s conditional letter places Crypto.com among a small but growing cohort of crypto and fintech firms pursuing national trust charters; recent related moves include Bridge’s conditional approval to organize a national trust (now part of Stripe) and Nomura’s Laser Digital filing to seek a similar charter.

Conditional approvals are a staged supervisory tool: the OCC typically requires applicants to meet specified capital, governance, anti‑money‑laundering and compliance milestones before issuing a final charter and permitting full bank‑style operations.

For institutional clients, a completed national trust charter promises a single federally supervised custodian option that can simplify counterparty diligence and potentially speed onboarding, while raising prudential expectations on reserve management, segregation and recovery planning.

The move also ties into parallel rule‑making and guidance across agencies: the CFTC has signaled that national trust banks can be eligible stablecoin issuers under its payment‑stablecoin framework, and the FDIC has floated supervisory approaches for banks running token programs—developments that reduce some legal ambiguity but increase cross‑agency scrutiny.

Not everyone supports the OCC’s pathway: the American Bankers Association has urged the OCC to pause or slow reviews of certain trust‑charter applications, warning that limited‑purpose trust entities that custody digital assets raise unresolved questions around custody segregation, capital, affiliated non‑bank activities and potential regulatory arbitrage with SEC/CFTC authorities.

Operationally, a national trust will subject Crypto.com to ongoing bank supervision, periodic reporting and prudential standards that should raise custody controls but will not eliminate protocol‑level risks such as smart‑contract exploits, oracle failures or cross‑chain bridge vulnerabilities.

Market structure implications are mixed: federal charters concentrate custody demand toward federally supervised entities—compressing fees and raising barriers for smaller custodians—but could also spur on‑shore liquidity and institutional participation if firms satisfy OCC milestones and interagency frictions remain contained.

The approval does not equal an immediate product launch. Final consummation depends on meeting the OCC’s supervisory conditions and surviving any additional scrutiny prompted by trade‑group objections, interagency coordination or legislative developments tied to token policy (including debates around the GENIUS Act and other frameworks).

For policymakers and market participants, the central questions are sequencing and coherence: whether the OCC’s conditional path can coexist with broader statutory rule‑making, or whether accelerated charters will prompt litigation, congressional intervention, or tighter cross‑agency guardrails that reshape implementation timetables.

Expect the next six to twelve months to reveal whether conditional approvals convert into a substantive federal custody ecosystem or instead trigger policy pushback that slows some chartered entrants.