Ripple has received final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to launch a national trust bank, the company announced Monday.

The development comes nearly a year after the regulator gave Ripple and four other cryptocurrency firms conditional approval for a trust bank charter.

The green light “is the result of a simple choice we made years ago: build within the regulatory perimeter, not around it,” Stuart Alderoty, Ripple’s chief legal officer, said in a Monday post on X.

“Clear rules + rigorous oversight create trust,” he said. “And trust is what allows new financial infrastructure to scale.”

A national trust charter does not allow Ripple to take deposits or lend commercially.

Ripple will be permitted, however, to provide fiduciary digital-asset custody services, manage the reserves supporting the company’s stablecoin RLUSD and act as a collateral trustee for those reserves, the firm said.

BNY has served as primary reserve custodian of RLUSD. And Ripple on Tuesday doubled down on its relationship with the nation’s oldest bank, announcing the two would “broaden institutional digital asset custody capabilities and explore new institutional use cases for blockchain technology, including tokenized trade finance.”

“We’ve always said crypto and banks work better together – this is what that looks like,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said Monday in a post on X, referring, at the time, to the charter.

With Tuesday’s deepened collaboration, BNY intends to boost its support for tokenized assets and investment products issued on Ripple’s XRP Ledger. The bank also aims to work with Ripple to enable clients to mint and redeem RLUSD directly through BNY, according to a press release issued Tuesday.

“We’re moving past the initial issuance of assets onchain – now, it’s all about making these tokenized assets usable for payments and collateral across financial markets,” Monica Long, Ripple’s president, said in a statement. “With BNY, we’re connecting the necessary components of financial infrastructure on the XRP Ledger so institutions can move from holding digital assets to using them within capital markets and trade finance seamlessly.”

BNY isn’t the only partner with whom Ripple is broadening its relationship. The company on Tuesday announced a “strategic partnership” that makes RLUSD available for retail and institutional use across the fintech Robinhood’s digital-asset ecosystem. 

RLUSD went live, as of Tuesday, on Robinhood Chain and Bitstamp, an outlet Robinhood acquired in 2024, and is expected to be available in the Robinhood app later this year, Ripple said in a press release. Robinhood can also now use RLUSD on the XRP Ledger for institutional settlement, Ripple added.

“This partnership reflects growing institutional demand for integrated solutions that support both customer-facing offerings and core financial operations,” Long said in a statement.

Johann Kerbrat, senior vice president and general manager of Robinhood Crypto and International, echoed the enthusiasm, noting the partnership shows “what a connected, global financial system looks like."

Garlinghouse, too, took the 10,000-foot view in his statement Monday, initially referring to Ripple’s charter.

“The revolution isn't happening outside the system. It's happening from within it,” he said.

But for much of this decade, Ripple had been on the outside looking in.

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple in December 2020, alleging the company’s flagship token, XRP, was a security. After a court battle that spanned years, a district judge ruled in 2023 that XRP counts as a security only when it’s sold to institutional investors – not to the general public. The judge handed Ripple a $125 million penalty. 

But the SEC, under new management in the second Trump administration, signaled it would drop the case and sought a penalty that would have returned $75 million to Ripple.

The judge refused, noting that Ripple and the regulator failed to demonstrate “exceptional circumstances.”

Ripple spent much of 2025 on an acquisition spree – buying prime brokerage firm Hidden Road, stablecoin platform Rail and treasury management software provider GTreasury.