Crypto firms keep winning US bank charters. Can you open an account with one?
Not the kind of account most people have in mind. The charters the OCC has been granting to crypto companies this year are national trust bank charters, which let a firm hold and manage assets for clients under federal supervision. They do not let that firm take your salary as a deposit, lend to you, or put FDIC insurance behind your balance, so a headline saying a crypto firm got a bank charter tells you very little about where to keep your cash.
What happened on 18 September
The OCC gave conditional approval to three more firms on the same day: Bastion, Agora and Catena. All three plan to run as national trust banks built around stablecoins and custody, and none of them will carry deposit insurance.
Bastion is the most interesting of the three. It builds the systems other companies use to issue and redeem their own stablecoins, and it is converting an existing New York state trust company into a federal one. Agora and Catena are starting from scratch.
That takes the 2026 total to at least twelve conditional approvals for crypto-linked firms, among them Bridge, Crypto.com and Coinbase. When Crypto.com received its approval in February, the scope was spelled out plainly: the firm can hold and stake digital assets for clients and settle trades, and it cannot take deposits or make loans.
What a trust bank can and cannot do
A national trust bank can hold crypto and other assets for clients, handle stablecoin issuance and redemption, and settle trades, with an OCC examiner watching over all of it.
It cannot take ordinary deposits, make loans, or give you the FDIC protection that covers a normal checking account.
Stablecoins sit outside that protection too. The OCC's own decision letters state that stablecoins are not deposits under US deposit insurance law, and the GENIUS Act says the same. A dollar stablecoin held with one of these firms rests on the reserves the law makes the issuer keep, and no government insurance fund stands behind it.
Why the news still matters to you
The first reason is your own bank's attitude. When the companies on the other side of your transfers answer to the same federal regulator as your bank, a compliance team has fewer grounds to treat each payment as an unknown risk. That shift will be slow, and nobody should expect blocked transfers to stop next month, but it points the right way.
The second is where your stablecoins will live. From January 2027, when the GENIUS Act's licensing rules start to apply, issuers serving US customers need a federal or approved state licence, and several of this year's trust banks exist to provide that.
The third is that conditional means conditional. None of the three September firms has opened. Bastion has six months to finish its conversion or the approval lapses, and each firm must hold enough liquid assets to pay 180 days of running costs in a wind-down during its first three years.
If you want a bank that takes deposits
That calls for a different licence. Revolut and OpenReserve won conditional approval as full national banks on 3 September, which is the route to checking accounts and deposit insurance. Even that approval is one step of several: FDIC insurance is a separate decision, and when we last checked, OpenReserve was still waiting on it and on the Federal Reserve. Their CBL profiles track where each one stands.
Before you move money to any newly chartered name, three questions will save you most of the trouble. Is it a bank or a trust bank? Does FDIC insurance cover your balance? Has it opened its doors yet? If the answers come back as trust bank, no and not yet, it belongs on your watch list for now.
See the list →Sources: American Banker, "OCC OKs three digital asset firms for trust bank charters", 22 September 2026. Forkast, "The OCC just approved three digital-asset bank charters in one day", 21 September 2026. TechFlow, conditions attached to the 18 September approvals. OCC Corporate Decision #1391 (Bastion), September 2026. OCC Corporate Decision #1365 (Bridge), February 2026. Banking Dive, "Crypto.com gets OCC's conditional nod for charter", February 2026.