Stripe's stablecoin wing vies for national trust charter from OCC 

Key insight: Bridge joins Circle, Ripple and Paxos in seeking a regulatory charter to serve customers

Expert Quote: "We've long believed stablecoins will be a core, regulated financial building block," Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams wrote on X. "This regulatory infrastructure will enable us to tokenize trillions of dollars and make this future possible."

Forward look: The wave of fintechs seeking charters may only continue as the administration's digital-asset-friendly regulators have signaled openness to encouraging "innovative" business models.

Stripe's stablecoin platform Bridge on Tuesday applied for a national trust charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to a post on X by one of the company's co-founders.

The move, announced by Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams, was marketed as a way for the company to build out its stablecoin business within the regulated financial perimeter, with plans to provide custody services, issue coins and manage reserves. 

"We've long believed stablecoins will be a core, regulated financial building block," Abrams wrote. "This regulatory infrastructure will enable us to tokenize trillions of dollars and make this future possible."

Bridge, which was acquired for just over a billion dollars by Stripe in February, won the right to issue its stablecoin USDH on Hyperliquid's decentralized finance platform last month. Stripe has been rolling out a number of new payment products and bills itself as a tool for businesses to make cross-border payments and hedge against inflation by keeping their reserves in stablecoins, pegged to fiat currency — usually the dollar. 

Abrms previewed the company's intent to apply for a charter in September, according to Bloomberg, adding that the company will also seek a New York State trust charter. At the time of this piece, the OCC has not posted the application filing to its website. 

Stripe is now the latest crypto firm seeking a national trust charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, just weeks after stablecoin issuer and exchange Coinbase's application was submitted, joining existing applicants like Circle, Ripple, and Paxos. Anchorage Digital remains the only crypto firm to have received OCC approval for a national trust bank, granted in January 2021 during the Trump administration's first term.

That increasing interest in trust charters from crypto firms has gotten the banking industry's attention, and banking trade groups have been urging regulators to carefully consider the ramifications of approving such charters, which bankers generally oppose. In July, the American Bankers Association sent a letter to the OCC urging the agency to pause its review of these applications pending a broader review of whether these applicants' business plans align with the purpose of the national trust charter. 

Trust companies are not new, but they've historically served a niche in the financial marketplace, allowing financial institutions to provide custodial services to their customers, like trust and estate management. 

OCC

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The OCC began exploring special-purpose charters in 2016 and, under then-Acting Comptroller Brian Brooks in 2020, examined the legal and practical groundwork for a proposed "payments charter." Though that initiative never launched, the exploration laid the foundation for the agency's Letter 1176 in 2021 — written by then-OCC chief counsel and now-Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould, which clarified how the OCC would evaluate and charter national trust banks. 

Critics of allowing fintechs to gain national trust charters have argued the move grants crypto and fintech firms competitive advantages without the same oversight, FDIC protection, or congressional mandate that traditional banks face. Fintech advocates say that national trust charters don't create loopholes but instead promote competition and innovation.

More broadly, banking advocates have been worried for some time that the growth of stablecoins could siphon trillions of core deposits from community banks, undermining their ability to fund local lending. An estimate from the Treasury predicts that stablecoins could grow to over $6 trillion in volume, a tectonic shift in the financial system that banks fear would pull primarily from bank deposits, reducing banks' profitability and their ability to drive economic growth. 

Still, regulators have been signaling increasing openness to fintechs entering the banking perimeter in the Trump administration. The OCC approved an agreement in which SmartBiz Loans bought Detroit-based Centrust Bank, acquired the community bank's national OCC-granted charter and changed its name to SmartBiz Bank in March.