Coinbase lands full US trust charter as OCC builds stablecoin regime

Coinbase just got the keys to a federal trust charter. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted full approval, letting the biggest US crypto exchange run its custody arm under a national banking regulator rather than leaning on state paperwork alone. The new entity is the Coinbase National Trust Company, a de novo national trust bank built from scratch — no acquisition, no rebrand of an existing bank — with fiduciary digital asset custody as its core job.

The road there was slow. Coinbase filed its application on October 3, 2025, and only landed conditional approval on April 2, 2026. Don't expect a hard cutover either: the application includes a three-year plan to shift the custody business under the federal umbrella, meaning Coinbase will straddle state and federal frameworks for a while. It also keeps its New York state trust charter and BitLicense in place — this is an added layer, not a swap.

There's a lot riding on that transfer. Coinbase held $245.7 billion in institutional custody assets as of mid-2025, and total assets on its platform hit $376 billion at year-end 2025 — which the research behind this report pegs at more than 12% of global crypto market capitalization. That's not a niche license upgrade; it's one of the largest pools of custodied crypto on earth moving toward federal supervision.

The charter comes with hard edges. It does not authorize retail deposits, lending, or fractional reserve banking, so these trust banks stay specialists rather than full-service lenders. Coinbase also isn't the only one at the window. Ripple reached the same status, and a growing list of firms are picking up provisional trust charters as the OCC puts the GENIUS Act into practice.

That law, signed in July 2025, set up a framework for payment stablecoin issuers — PPSIs in the statute's language — and national trust banks are one of the structures the OCC is using to pull issuers and custodians inside it. Ripple is the clearest test case: conditional OCC approval for its national trust bank on December 12, 2025, then final approval on October 26, 2026. Its RLUSD stablecoin carries an estimated market cap of $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion.

Coinbase's charter centers on custody while Ripple's points at stablecoin issuance, but both now hold the same class of license. That matters competitively — Coinbase already dominates US institutional custody, and rivals without a federal charter may struggle to win clients who increasingly expect a federal regulator in the room.