The OCC crypto trust charter wave has put the Bank Policy Institute (BPI) on a war footing. The lobby, whose board seats belong to the CEOs of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, has retained outside counsel and is actively weighing a lawsuit against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. No complaint has been filed. That is the strategy.
What the OCC Crypto Trust Charter Actually Grants
A national trust bank charter is a federal licence from the OCC: fiduciary custody and asset safekeeping, no deposit-taking, no lending. The decisive feature is national preemption. One charter replaces the state-by-state money-transmitter licensing maze and installs a single federal supervisor.
The current controversy begins on 12 December 2025, when the OCC issued conditional approvals to six applicants in a single batch: BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, Ripple, Circle, and First National Digital Currency Bank, the last of these not widely listed in subsequent coverage. According to the OCC’s interpretations and decisions index, Ripple’s approval (Conditional Approval 1359) was for a de novo charter under the name Ripple National Trust Bank, while BitGo (Conditional Approval 1353), Fidelity Digital Assets (Conditional Approval 1355), and Paxos (Conditional Approval 1358) were conversions from existing state trust companies. The distinction matters: a de novo application has no prior operating history to convert, which makes the supervisory build-out more demanding.
February brought conditional approvals for Crypto.com, Bridge, and Stripe. Add opposition letters against Connectia Trust, National Association and payments firm Wise, and the BPI was contesting charters well beyond the headline crypto cohort. By early March, roughly eleven firms had received conditional approvals or filed applications within approximately 83 days.
The April Rule the Banks Consider the Real Offence
Running alongside the approvals was a regulatory rewrite. OCC Bulletin 2026-4, published 27 February 2026 and effective 1 April 2026, amended 12 CFR 5.20 to describe permissible activities as ‘trust company operations and related activities’, replacing narrower fiduciary language. The bulletin states the rule ‘would neither expand nor contract the OCC’s authority to charter a national bank.’ The BPI’s lawyers read it differently: as the sentence that blesses substantial non-fiduciary business, stablecoin reserve custody, payments-adjacent services, inside a limited-purpose charter.
The BPI’s legal argument is not frivolous. The core claim is statutory: the trust charter exists for genuine fiduciary businesses, and firms whose actual activities are custody, payments, and stablecoin issuance are using the trust wrapper to obtain federal preemption and the word ‘bank’ without the accompanying costs: deposit insurance assessments, Bank Holding Company Act supervision, community reinvestment obligations, and the capital regime built for institutions whose failure affects depositors.
The BPI’s opposition campaign pre-dates December’s batch. A BPI comment letter dated 14 October 2025 urged the OCC to reject the application of National Digital Trust Company, citing concern that approval would exceed statutory trust charter authority. By 1 November 2025, according to BPI’s own account, the lobby was also opposing Wise’s charter application, and reported that its Freedom of Information Act requests for full application materials had been rejected, with business plans heavily redacted by the OCC.
Why There Is Still No Lawsuit
The threat may outperform the verdict. A retained-counsel posture pressures the OCC to slow approvals and attach heavier conditions, clouds every pending application, and costs nothing, while actual litigation risks ratifying the charter pathway with precedent. Discovery cuts both ways: BPI members run their own digital-asset businesses. Suing the Trump administration’s OCC, under a Comptroller whose interpretive groundwork underpins the very rule being challenged, is political capital the banks may prefer to conserve.
The BPI is not a lobby that bluffs from weakness. It joined the 2024 litigation challenging the Federal Reserve’s stress-testing framework and won concessions. The live round is chambered where the agency can see it.
Ripple’s Position and the Anchorage Precedent
Ripple National Trust Bank remains conditional. Pre-opening requirements are outstanding, and the April rule defining what the bank may do is precisely what the BPI contests. Separately, as reported by BPI in July 2025, it is Ripple’s subsidiary Standard Custody & Trust Company that filed for a Federal Reserve master account, adding a second regulatory dependency to the conditional charter.
Circle reached final approval on 10 July 2026, becoming only the second crypto-native firm to complete the journey. The first was Anchorage Digital, conditionally approved in January 2021. A Supervisory Condition Letter (2026-01) dated 9 February 2026 noted the formal termination of the operating agreement that had governed Anchorage since its conditional approval, meaning the framework that guided the only completed example was itself retired just as eleven new applicants entered the supervisory pipeline.
Anchorage’s path was neither fast nor light: it absorbed a public consent order over Bank Secrecy Act compliance shortfalls and spent years remediating. The banks’ claim of a lighter rulebook has to contend with that record. The industry’s claim that the charter wave is routine has to contend with the inverse: if the best-resourced early mover took over four years and a consent order to reach full operation, the December cohort is at the start of a supervisory gauntlet, not weeks from opening.
What to Watch
The GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rulemaking is the missing map. All relevant agencies missed the law’s 18 July rulemaking deadline. Final rules defining reserve custody would either legitimise the trust-charter model or hand the BPI statutory language to litigate against. Whoever the rulebook favours inherits the high ground.
The other binary is simpler: the first BPI filing, or the first wave of final OCC approvals. Either breaks the current equilibrium. A rapid push converting the December cohort from conditional to operating builds reliance interests a court would hesitate to disturb; a complaint converts the threat into years of litigation with every chartered firm as a hostage. The OCC’s examination staffing and the conditions attached to each approval are the observable variables that will show which outcome is coming first.
