Crypto.com announced that it has received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to form a national trust bank, setting the exchange up to expand its custody services under federal oversight.
The planned Foris-Dachs National Trust Bank would do business as Crypto.com National Trust Bank and operate as a limited purpose National Trust Bank. It will not accept deposits or issue loans, but instead will provide services such as storage, staking, and transaction settlement for digital assets, including those on the internal Khronos blockchain.
Crypto.com already operates Crypto.com Custody Trust Co., a qualified custodian regulated by the New Hampshire Department of Banking, but the OCC Charter would place its institutional services under a single federal framework.
This is a key issue for exchange traded fund (ETF) issuers, asset managers and other institutional investors, who often prefer state-supervised custodians that can streamline compliance and investment processes.
Although the National Charter provides a one-stop-shop structure, it only covers trust services and not traditional banking.
Crypto.com filed an application with the OCC in October. Although conditional approval is not final, it is a significant step forward. Last week, Stable’s stablecoin company Bridge also received initial approval to establish a national trust bank.
With these approvals, both companies join a growing group of cryptocurrency companies looking to build within the federal framework. In December, BitGo, Circle, Ripple, Paxos, and Fidelity Digital Assets received similar conditional approval.
