A possible legal clash is building around the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s trust-charter push after banking groups and state supervisors intensified their criticism of the agency’s decision to approve or advance national trust bank charters for crypto and fintech firms.
There is no public lawsuit filed as of March 10. Instead, reports said the Bank Policy Institute was weighing legal action, while the official material reviewed shows BPI, the Independent Community Bankers of America, and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors have all been pressing the OCC for months over the same issue. A report on the possible lawsuit was published by The Guardian.
The official OCC record is narrower and more precise than many circulating summaries. On December 12, the OCC announced conditional approvals for five national trust bank charter applications: First National Digital Currency Bank, which is Circle’s proposed bank, Ripple National Trust Bank, BitGo Bank & Trust, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos Trust Company.
That means one common version of the story needs correcting. Circle was part of the December batch. Fidelity, Ripple, BitGo, and Paxos were as well. Those approvals were conditional, not final, and the OCC said the institutions still must satisfy preopening conditions before they can commence business.
The OCC later granted preliminary conditional approval to Foris DAX National Trust Bank, which plans to do business as Crypto.com National Trust Bank. Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company owned by Stripe, separately said it received conditional approval from the OCC to organize Bridge National Trust Bank, and the OCC’s public application record shows the Bridge filing in its Corporate Applications Search system.
That distinction matters because Stripe did not receive a charter in its own name. The applicant was Bridge. And the most important official approvals so far came in separate waves, not in one single catchall list.
The fight is less about whether crypto can ever enter the banking perimeter and more about the terms on which it gets in. BPI has argued that the OCC’s trust charter authority is meant for institutions predominantly engaged in trust and fiduciary activities, while some applicants are proposing businesses that look much closer to payments, stablecoin reserve management, and other bank-like activity.
In an October 31 statement opposing several pending applications, BPI said companies should not receive trust charters unless they plan to operate as genuine trust companies, and warned that allowing firms to choose a lighter regulatory touch while offering bank-like products could heighten systemic risk and undermine the credibility of the charter itself.
That same concern carried into the rulemaking battle. In a January 14 letter with ICBA, BPI argued that the OCC’s proposed trust-charter rule was especially significant because of an unprecedented influx of applications tied to cryptocurrencies and payments, and said those businesses could materially change the banking landscape with implications for safety and soundness and systemic risk.
On February 27, the OCC finalized a rule stating that national trust banks can engage in the operations of a trust company and activities related thereto, and said the change neither expands nor contracts the agency’s chartering authority. The rule takes effect on April 1.
Critics do not accept that this is a mere clarification. CSBS said the final rule gives the OCC unfettered discretion to decide case by case what activities future national trust banks can perform, while ICBA warned that uninsured national trust banks engaging substantially in non-fiduciary crypto-related activities would raise serious public-policy concerns for consumers and financial stability.
This is why the dispute is becoming more combustible. The industry does not just object to a few approvals. It objects to the broader legal interpretation that could support many more approvals to come.
At the center of the fight is a question about regulatory perimeter design. Crypto firms want a federal path that can support custody, stablecoin infrastructure, and related services under a single supervisor rather than a patchwork of state-by-state permissions. Traditional banking groups argue that firms should not be allowed to provide bank-like services through a trust-bank structure if that route avoids the full prudential framework that applies to deposit-taking banks and their holding companies.
That means the argument is not mainly about branding or politics. It is about activity scope, capital, supervision, and whether trust-bank authority can be used as a lighter entry point into functions that affect payments, reserves, settlement, and custody across the financial system.
For crypto firms, the OCC pathway offers nationwide reach and federal oversight without having to build a full-service insured bank. For incumbent banks, that looks like an uneven chartering regime that could shift risk without imposing the same balance-sheet and group-level obligations.
The near-term watchpoints are straightforward. First, whether BPI or allied groups actually file suit. Second, whether the OCC publishes more detailed decisions for newer approvals beyond the December batch. Third, whether more applicants move forward before the April 1 effective date of the OCC’s final rule.
For now, the root-source record supports a more careful version of the story than many headlines suggest. The OCC has approved multiple crypto and fintech trust-bank moves, but not all through the same mechanism or on the same date. Banking groups have clearly laid the legal and policy groundwork for a challenge, but a court fight remains a possibility, not yet a completed state change.
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