On 12 December 2025 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted conditional approval to five national trust bank charter applications from digital-asset firms[1]. Two are new banks: First National Digital Currency Bank, owned by Circle, and Ripple National Trust Bank. Three are conversions of existing state trust companies: BitGo Bank & Trust, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos Trust Company.
Comptroller Jonathan Gould framed the decision as competition policy: new entrants, he said, "provide access to new products, services and sources of credit to consumers, and ensure a dynamic, competitive and diverse banking system." The approvals remain subject to conditions set out in the individual decisions.
Why it matters
National trust banks have long been allowed to provide custody and safekeeping, and the five will join around 60 national trust banks already operating[2]. What is new is the type of firm. Stablecoin issuers and digital-asset custodians are choosing to come inside the federal banking perimeter rather than operate around it, and the regulator is letting them.
Not everyone is comfortable. Greg Baer of the Bank Policy Institute said the approvals leave "substantial unanswered questions", chiefly whether the requirements are appropriately tailored[2].
What most commentary misses
The coverage frames this as crypto winning legitimacy. The more practical consequence is competitive. Institutional custody and settlement for tokenised assets is a business that large custodian banks expected to own. It will now be contested by federally chartered specialists that were built for it, with one supervisor and one set of rules nationwide.
What to do
Banks with custody, treasury or payments businesses should decide within the next planning cycle whether digital-asset custody and settlement is a line they will build, buy capability for, or partner on. The newly chartered firms will be looking for bank partners and clients at the same time. The conditions in these approvals are worth reading closely too: they are the clearest statement yet of what the OCC expects from a digital-asset bank.