- Key insight: Circle has now been granted a national trust bank charter from the OCC so it can manage custody of digital assets such as its USDC stablecoin.
- Expert quote: "Opening the national trust bank is a tremendous accomplishment for Circle and, for stablecoins, a step into the world of the GENIUS Act." — FS Vector's Jasper Sneff-Nanni
- Forward look: Circle is now authorized to open the trust bank for business and will do so likely within days of receiving the charter.
Stablecoin issuer Circle Group has received final approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish its national trust bank division.
Circle announced on Friday that the federal regulator has granted it a de novo national trust bank charter to create the holding company First National Digital Currency Bank, which will operate under the name Circle National Trust.
The charter places the New York City-based company's dollar-backed stablecoin,
"Circle National Trust is authorized to open on or after July 10, 2026, and we expect to open the bank shortly thereafter," a Circle spokesperson told American Banker. "The OCC has not instituted a timeline or deadline for the trust bank's opening."
Jasper Sneff-Nanni, managing principal at fintech consulting firm FS Vector, told American Banker that if there is a gap between the charter being granted and the bank's opening "it will likely not be more than a couple of days."
"Opening the national trust bank is a tremendous accomplishment for Circle and, for stablecoins, a step into the world of the GENIUS Act," Sneff-Nanni said. "Although the trust bank is not the issuer of USDC, it cements USDC's status as the premier incumbent in a world of regulated stablecoins."
According to the OCC's
Per its business plan approved by the OCC, the trust bank "may eventually offer its digital asset custody service to a limited number of institutional customers directly, focusing on banks and other financial institutions, such as regulated derivatives organizations."
"OCC approval to establish Circle National Trust marks a defining step in bringing blockchain technology and digital assets into the core of the U.S. financial system," said Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire. "Federal oversight of our trust bank sets a new standard for transparency, governance and scale for Circle's infrastructure and unlocks a new phase of adoption where leading financial institutions can build on public blockchains with clarity and confidence."
The company is also planning on USDC reserve management as a future capability, according to a statement.
A KeyBank analyst research note said that holding a charter "further distances Circle from less-regulated peers."
"Reserve management and a third-party custody offering would likely have relatively more material model impacts," analysts wrote, "though timing is uncertain and we would view these as more incremental versus transformative."
Circle originally submitted its application to the OCC in June of last year. In 2015, Circle became the first company to receive a BitLicense from the New York Department of Financial Services and continues to hold that license.
Houston Frost, chief product officer for enterprise payments company Usio and board member of a community sponsor bank for fintechs, told American Banker that regulators opening the path for fintechs to become banks is an overall positive for the industry.
Frost said that the previous difficulty of obtaining bank charters meant that fintechs almost exclusively went to smaller community banks to sponsor their financial products instead. These "banking-as-a-service" partnerships supported innovation in the tech community and brought new business to small banks, he said, but could be at risk of causing management issues.
"A community bank [can have] a real balance sheet management problem because they should be handling the deposits from a fintech company differently than they should be handling the deposits in their community," he said.
Opening up the option for fintechs to receive charters, according to Frost, is "good for the safety and soundness of banking and fintech as a whole."
"If that was the right move for the safety and soundness of their customers and for their business model, then regulators should have had a pathway and I'm very happy to see that they're now offering that pathway," he said.
