Coinbase received conditional approval for a national trust charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the company announced Thursday, and was quick to detail everything that didn’t mean.
A conditional charter “is the result of years of investment in compliance, engagement with regulators, and belief that the right path forward for crypto is through the system — not around it,” wrote Greg Tusar, co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional.
“Let me be direct about what this means, and what it doesn't,” Tusar said. “Coinbase is not becoming a commercial bank. We will not be taking retail deposits. We will not be engaging in fractional reserve banking.”
A wave of conditional national trust charters has landed in the hands of crypto companies, prompting pushback from trade groups and watchdogs like Americans for Financial Reform, which said Thursday that such charters “expose the broader financial system to the caustic volatility, fraud, and money laundering endemic to crypto markets.”
Tusar, however, said in Coinbase’s blog post that the charter brings “federal regulatory uniformity to the custody and market infrastructure business we have been building for years.”
“The OCC charter was designed precisely for this purpose — to provide clear oversight over assets in safekeeping — and that is exactly how we intend to use it,” he said.
Coinbase applied for a trust charter in October, nabbing conditional approval roughly 180 days later. The OCC aims to make such decisions in 120 days, according to its leasing manual, and Comptroller Jonathan Gould has pushed to adhere closely to that deadline.
A spokesperson for Coinbase did not immediately respond to an inquiry into its application timeline. The firm had been mulling a charter application since April 2025.
In the company blog post, Tusar wrote that conditional approval “means that our model of engaging with regulators, earning their trust, and operating to the highest standards has been validated.”
But some banking groups have taken issue with the OCC’s interpretation of licensing rules enough to take legal action, according to a report last month by The Guardian. The Bank Policy Institute is considering a lawsuit against the OCC that would prevent it from issuing national trust charters to crypto firms, a source familiar with the matter told The Guardian.
The Independent Community Bankers of America on Thursday expressed concerns with the OCC’s recent final chartering rule for national trust banks, which the organization’s president, Rebeca Romero Rainey, said “is inconsistent with its statutory authority laid out in legislative history, judicial interpretations, and the agency’s own internal precedent.”
Coinbase is the eighth firm to be awarded a conditional national trust charter since December. The others are Ripple, Circle, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, Crypto.com, and Stripe’s Bridge.
Tusar wrote in Coinbase’s blog post that federal oversight will bring “consistency and uniformity” to its custody business and allow for the creation of new products for their customers.
The OCC leasing manual does not lay out timelines for final charter approval. No recent recipient of a conditional national trust charter has received final charter approval.
