Coinbase is now, officially, a federally chartered trust bank. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency finished the chartering process on Friday, November 6, and Coinbase announced it on Monday, November 9. The new entity is Coinbase National Trust Company, and it puts America's biggest crypto custodian under direct federal banking supervision for the first time. Before anyone gets carried away, this does not make Coinbase a bank in the way most people use the word. It cannot take your deposits, it cannot make you a loan, and it cannot issue a stablecoin. What it can do is hold digital assets for institutions as a fiduciary, under the watch of a federal banking regulator, and that is still a big deal for an industry that spent years asking for exactly this.
What the charter actually covers
The new trust company is a non-insured national trust company based in New York, and its job is fiduciary custody of digital assets, mostly for institutional clients, along with certain transaction services tied to the assets it holds. Coinbase already runs a custody business through Coinbase Custody Trust Company, a limited-purpose trust chartered by New York's financial regulator, and it plans to move that business over to the federal trust company over the next three years. Staking, prime trading and prime financing will stay with Coinbase affiliates, with the trust company acting as a middleman rather than doing those jobs itself. The OCC also attached strings. For the first three years the trust company has to hold at least $60 million in Tier 1 capital and keep enough liquid assets on hand to cover 180 days of operating expenses. One thing the charter does not hand over automatically is access to the Federal Reserve's payment systems, which needs a separate application.
Coinbase is not the first, and it will not be the last
Ripple got its own final OCC approval on October 26, for a national trust bank that will hold the reserves behind its RLUSD stablecoin and act as collateral trustee. Circle, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos all have trust charter applications moving through the OCC as well, according to crypto.news. A year ago, the idea of crypto companies holding federal banking charters sounded like a lobbying fantasy, and now there is a queue forming at the regulator's door. The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, gave payment stablecoins a federal framework, and the charters are the next layer of that project. The process itself was not quick. Coinbase applied in October 2025 and got conditional approval on April 2, 2026, and the OCC only signed off on the final step after the company finished its pre-opening requirements. Coinbase vice chairman Ryan VanGrack said the company has spent years asking for clear rules and rigorous oversight, and that the charter puts more of its business behind that commitment. That is corporate language, but in this case the timeline backs it up.
The fight over these charters is not over
Not everyone is cheering. The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the OCC on October 2, arguing that crypto firms can get federal banking status without meeting the obligations that come with being a traditional insured bank. Its president, Rebeca Romero Rainey, said digital assets held at a crypto firm operating under a national trust charter do not carry the same safeguards as money at an insured bank. The lawsuit challenges the OCC's March 2026 chartering rule and asks a federal court in Washington to throw it out. The OCC's position is that national trust banks can do activities connected to traditional trust work, and its final chartering rule took effect April 1, 2026. The practical point is plain. The trust company is not FDIC-insured, so assets held there do not carry deposit insurance, and the legal fight over whether these charters should exist at all is still live. A court could still change the rules after the fact.
So Coinbase is a federally chartered trust company now, and that is a real milestone, not a press release dressed up as one. The custody business that holds hundreds of billions of dollars in client assets now answers to a federal banking regulator, and the rest of the industry is lining up right behind it. Just remember what the charter is and what it is not. It is federal supervision for institutional custody, not a bank account for you, and the court challenge means the whole arrangement could still be argued over for years. The crypto industry spent a decade asking to be treated like the rest of finance. It is getting its wish, paperwork and lawsuits included.
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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News
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