The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said this week that companies engaged in legally permissible digital-asset activities should have a path to becoming national banks, formalizing a stance the agency has been building toward through a string of charter approvals over the past several months. The statement doesn't automatically authorize any crypto firm to operate as a bank, but it sets out the OCC's position that crypto-related activities can be weighed within the same national bank chartering process applied to any other applicant.
Comptroller Jonathan V. Gould framed the position directly in the agency's statement:
Entities that engage in legally permissible activities, including those involving digital assets and other novel technologies, should have a path to becoming a national bank.
The OCC's statement also said the agency is working to revive de novo bank chartering more broadly and welcomed recent changes by the FDIC intended to clarify the deposit-insurance application process for new entrants.
Building on a year of incremental approvals
The announcement extends a pattern that began in earnest in December 2025, when the OCC conditionally approved five applications at once — the first mass grant of federal trust charters to crypto firms. That batch included two de novo entities, Circle's First National Digital Currency Bank and Ripple National Trust Bank, alongside three conversions from state trust companies: BitGo Bank and Trust, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos Trust Company. Circle's entity received final approval on July 10, 2026, making it the first crypto-native firm to complete the full chartering process since Anchorage Digital did so in 2021.
Regulatory clarity without a blanket approval
What the OCC issued this week is a policy signal rather than a new set of approvals — it does not pre-clear any specific digital-asset activity, and each applicant will still face the same underwriting and supervisory review the agency applies to traditional bank charter requests. The distinction matters for an industry that has spent years navigating charter applications on a case-by-case basis, often without clear guidance on which activities would pass OCC scrutiny at all. A published position from the Comptroller narrows some of that uncertainty even without guaranteeing any particular outcome.
The move also lands as Congress remains stalled on broader crypto market-structure legislation, leaving agencies like the OCC to define the regulatory perimeter through individual rulemaking and charter decisions rather than a comprehensive statute. For firms like Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos that have already secured charters, the OCC's clearer stance offers a more defined roadmap for the next wave of applicants to follow.
