Crypto companies are getting bank charters — the word bank is doing less than it looks

Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, now holds a federal US bank charter — and it still cannot offer you a checking account, an FDIC-insured savings account or a mortgage. Its Circle National Trust belongs to a growing group of crypto companies receiving national trust bank charters from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a form of bank built around custody, record-keeping and settlement rather than deposits and lending.

A commercial bank does several jobs under one roof. It gathers deposits, runs payment accounts, extends credit and holds assets for customers. Deposit insurance supports confidence in the funding side, and lending produces much of the income. A national trust bank starts from a different place. Its centre of gravity is fiduciary work: holding property for another party, administering assets, executing instructions and maintaining records. The OCC’s own guidance says most national trust banks do not make loans, take deposits or carry FDIC insurance.

Since December, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, Bridge, Crypto.com, Coinbase, Morgan Stanley and World Liberty Financial have all received some form of OCC approval, and most are still working through the conditions required before they can open. The legal form is old rather than a crypto invention: the OCC said it already supervised roughly 60 national trust banks when it approved five digital-asset applications in December, and its Morgan Stanley decision put assets under administration at uninsured national trust banks at $7.2 trillion as of March 31. Circle received final approval on July 10 for the entity that operates as Circle National Trust, which plans to begin with fiduciary digital-asset custody for Circle and its affiliates; custody for selected institutions and management of USDC reserves are listed as possible later capabilities.

The appeal to the companies is straightforward. A national charter replaces a patchwork of state permissions with a single federal supervisor, moves reserve and custody operations inside the issuer’s own corporate family, and lets a firm tell institutional clients that the entity holding the asset is supervised as a national bank. Comptroller Jonathan Gould said on Aug. 19 that 23 of the 40 new charter applications the agency had received over the previous 18 months included digital-asset activity in their business plans, and that the OCC expects to issue its final GENIUS Act rule by November. Approvals also come in grades: a preliminary or conditional decision lets an applicant organise the institution and satisfy capital, governance and compliance requirements, with opening coming later.

For a beginner, the discipline is to read the label narrowly. Federal supervision is real, and it is not the same thing as insurance. Whether anything is FDIC-insured depends on the specific liability, the legal entity holding it and how that entity would be treated in insolvency — not on the word bank appearing in a company’s name. So when a service advertises a charter, the questions worth asking are which entity holds your assets, what that entity is actually approved to do today, and whether it has opened for business at all. This is information, not advice.