The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted World Liberty Trust Company preliminary conditional approval on 14 August, and the ownership structure behind it is more complex than the original reporting suggested. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s group controls StringZ Holding RSC, which holds a 49% stake in WLTC Holdings LLC, the Delaware-registered holding company behind the planned trust bank.
The Wall Street Journal first connected Tahnoon to StringZ. What the WSJ report did not detail is that OCC Corporate Decision #1385 names two additional investor entities that also signed passivity commitments with the regulator: AMGUS, LLC and DT Marks SC LLC. The decision lists Hamad Khlfan Ali Matar Alshamsi as the manager of StringZ and the signatory on its passivity filing. Neither StringZ’s beneficial ownership nor the identities behind AMGUS and DT Marks SC LLC are disclosed in the OCC document.
An entity affiliated with the Trump family holds a reported 38% of WLTC Holdings, per a person cited by the WSJ. The remaining disclosed stakes do not sum to 100%, and the OCC filing does not clarify the full cap table.
World Liberty Trust Company’s OCC Conditions
Before the bank can open, it must satisfy a set of pre-opening requirements. Per American Banker, those conditions include maintaining a minimum of $20 million in Tier 1 capital, with at least $10 million of that held in eligible liquid assets such as cash or government obligations maturing within 90 days.
The charter application was filed in January 2026. If final approval follows, the bank will be headquartered in Bay Harbor Islands, Florida, operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of WLTC Holdings LLC.
The strategic rationale is straightforward: bring USD1 stablecoin issuance, redemption and custody under a federally supervised entity. According to American Banker, that would mean transferring custody of USD1 from BitGo Bank and Trust to World Liberty Trust Company once the new bank is operational.
FinTech Futures reports that WLTC has outlined a five-person board structure comprising World Liberty Financial founders and independent directors. Mack McCain has been named chief trust officer. Daniel Dietzel, formerly CFO at institutional prime broker Hidden Road, joins as chief financial officer.
A Broader Wave of Crypto Trust Charters
World Liberty’s approval is not an isolated event. The OCC granted conditional approvals to five other national trust bank applications on 12 December 2025: Ripple National Trust Bank as a de novo applicant, and BitGo Bank and Trust, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos Trust Company, and First National Digital Currency Bank converting from state trust companies. World Liberty’s August 2026 conditional approval follows that cluster by roughly eight months.
For the OCC, the pattern is increasingly legible: federally chartered trust banks are becoming the preferred regulatory wrapper for stablecoin custody and issuance infrastructure.
The political dimension has not quietened either. Tahnoon’s group previously backed a $500 million purchase of a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial itself. Democratic senators called for hearings into that transaction and whether it shaped US policy toward the UAE. Tahnoon chairs AI company G42, which received authorisation to import advanced US AI chips in November 2025, months after Washington and Abu Dhabi signed a broader AI cooperation framework.
The OCC filing explicitly states that StringZ, DT Marks SC LLC, and AMGUS each signed commitments not to influence the bank. Those passivity pledges are standard in OCC charter proceedings but carry no enforcement mechanism beyond the regulator’s ongoing supervisory authority. Whether that structure withstands political scrutiny, given the overlapping interests between the UAE investors and the Trump-affiliated stake, is the question Democratic lawmakers have been circling since the original $500 million deal surfaced. Final OCC approval is the next concrete trigger to watch.
