The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted World Liberty Trust Co. preliminary conditional approval for a national trust bank charter on Friday, August 14, roughly seven months after the Trump-linked venture filed its application in January. Final approval still requires the company to satisfy a set of additional preopening requirements before it can begin operating.
The charter would let World Liberty Trust Company issue USD1, a fiat-backed stablecoin, directly to institutional clients nationwide, taking over a role currently held exclusively by BitGo Bank & Trust, National Association. The entity also plans to offer digital asset custody services as a fiduciary, primarily for USD1 holders and other institutional customers.
In its approval, the OCC said the decision was “granted based on a thorough evaluation of all information available to the OCC, including the representations and commitments made in the application and by the Bank’s representatives.” Notably, World Liberty Trust does not intend to become a federally insured depository institution, seek Federal Reserve master account access, or qualify as a “bank” under the Bank Holding Company Act — a narrower structure than a full commercial bank charter but one that still places its stablecoin operations under direct federal supervision.
A Crowded Field of New Charters
World Liberty joins a fast-growing list of crypto and stablecoin firms that have pursued the same path in 2026. The OCC conditionally approved five applications in a single batch in December 2025 — Circle’s First National Digital Currency Bank, Ripple National Trust Bank, and conversions from BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos Trust Company — with three of those five, BitGo, Fidelity and Paxos, also planning to issue their own stablecoins. February brought conditional approvals for Protego, Stripe’s Bridge subsidiary and a Crypto.com entity, and Circle’s national bank received final approval in July. World Liberty’s own OCC filing lays out the entity’s proposed business plan in detail, including its custody and stablecoin-issuance scope.
Related: Citigroup's Fraser Backs CLARITY Act, Presses for Stablecoin Fixes
Political Pushback Continues
The approval did not come without friction. Senator Elizabeth Warren has opposed World Liberty’s application, citing concerns about the Trump family’s ties to the venture and what she has described as inadequate safeguards against conflicts of interest. OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould has said the agency would proceed on the merits of the application without regard to politics, a position consistent with the OCC’s broader push this year to bring a wide range of crypto and stablecoin issuers under a single federal supervisory framework rather than a patchwork of state trust charters.
If World Liberty clears its remaining preopening requirements, USD1 issuance would shift from BitGo’s exclusive purview to a bank chartered specifically around the Trump-linked venture — a structural change that regulatory watchers say is likely to draw continued scrutiny even after the charter is finalized. The approval also arrives as other crypto-adjacent regulatory questions remain unresolved elsewhere in Washington; the SEC, for instance, has canceled a planned meeting on crypto offering rules without setting a new date, leaving banking regulators like the OCC to move faster than their securities counterparts on digital-asset policy.
