Timeline
- 7.8
OCC Gives Catena Preliminary Conditional Approval for National Trust Bank
The proposed bank could custody and manage fiat, securities and digital assets, but Catena must meet capital, liquidity and preopening requirements before it can operate.
- 7.5
Bastion wins conditional OCC approval for national trust bank charter
Stablecoin infrastructure provider Bastion said the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) granted preliminary conditional approval for a national trust bank charter for its proposed Bastion Platforms National Trust Company. The new charter adds OCC federal supervision on top of the state licenses Bastion already holds, including a New York trust charter acquired in February 2025, and the entity will offer stablecoin custody and wallets, payment infrastructure and white-label issuance from a single federally regulated institution. This is a significant regulatory milestone for stablecoin infrastructure because it lets one federally supervised entity bundle custody, wallets, payments and white-label issuance instead of stitching together state-by-state licenses. It follows final approvals for Circle and BitGo and a conditional approval for Ripple, showing that the national trust bank charter has become the crypto industry's main route into the US banking system. The approval is preliminary and conditional, and the proposed trust bank cannot accept deposits or make loans, so it is not a conventional commercial bank and carries limited near-term systemic weight. OCC rules require such charters to begin operations within a fixed window, and Paxos's earlier conditional approval lapsed in March 2023 after it missed the 18-month operational deadline, making execution timing a key variable.