Senator Elizabeth Warren sent the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency a letter on May 18 demanding the full charter files for nine crypto firms the agency has greenlit since December, accusing the regulator of letting digital asset companies “evade the fundamental safeguards and obligations that come with being a bank.” The Massachusetts Democrat set a June 1 deadline for the records and named Coinbase, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, Circle’s First National Digital Currency Bank, Stripe’s Bridge unit, Crypto.com’s Foris DAX, and Protego.
The challenge lands six weeks after a quieter move that did the actual structural work. An April 1 amendment to the agency’s chartering regulation swapped the phrase “fiduciary activities” for “operations of a trust company and activities related thereto.” That eight-word rewrite, not the individual approvals, is the document the legal fight will run into.
The Letter and the Names
Warren addressed her ten-page letter to OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould, the former crypto-industry lawyer confirmed in 2025 to run the agency. She requested every charter application file, including confidential exhibits, plus any correspondence between the regulator and President Donald Trump, his immediate family, or anyone “employed by or on behalf of” the Trump family relating to the approvals.
The list of firms spans the largest revenue lines in U.S. crypto. Coinbase and Ripple anchor the roster as the country’s biggest listed and pre-listed exchanges. Paxos and Circle dominate dollar-pegged stablecoin issuance, with Circle’s USD Coin (USDC, a fiat-backed digital dollar) holding the largest regulated reserve pool in the country. Fidelity Digital Asset Services serves institutional custody for its parent’s brokerage book. BitGo is a wallet and custody pure-play. Stripe’s Bridge handles stablecoin payment rails picked up in a 2024 acquisition. Foris DAX is Crypto.com’s retail trading affiliate. Protego markets a custody and settlement stack aimed at hedge funds.
What ties them together, in the senator’s framing, is the gap between what a national trust bank is allowed to do under statute and what these business plans describe. She cited language in the applications referencing “non-fiduciary custodial activities, facilitating payments and lending activities, and conducting stablecoin activities closely related to deposit-taking.” On her read, those services look closer to commercial banking than to traditional trust management, where the franchise is administering assets on behalf of estates and beneficiaries rather than moving money through the payment system.
These companies are effectively crypto banks that want to evade the fundamental safeguards and obligations that come with being a bank.
That sentence, from the body of the letter, is the line cable producers picked up first. It also sets the standard Warren wants the OCC’s response to be measured against.
Nine Approvals in Under Five Months
The approvals stacked up quickly. The first batch of conditional charters cleared in December 2025, weeks after the agency’s new leadership took over and months ahead of the rule rewrite that took effect on April 1, 2026.
| Firm | Parent or Affiliate | Core Activity Cited in Filing |
|---|---|---|
| Coinbase National Trust Company | Coinbase Global | Institutional custody, payments |
| Ripple National Trust Bank | Ripple Labs | XRP custody, stablecoin reserves |
| First National Digital Currency Bank | Circle | USDC reserves, custody |
| Paxos Trust Company | Paxos | Stablecoin issuance, custody |
| Fidelity Digital Asset Services | Fidelity Investments | Institutional custody |
| BitGo Bank and Trust N.A. | BitGo | Wallet custody, settlement |
| Bridge National Trust Bank | Stripe | Stablecoin payment rails |
| Foris DAX National Trust Bank | Crypto.com | Retail custody |
| National Digital Trust Company | Protego | Settlement, custody |
By the senator’s count, the regulator has at least two more pending applications, from Morgan Stanley and from World Liberty Financial, the Trump-family-affiliated crypto venture. That second name is part of why the records request reaches into White House communications.
The Rule Swap That Cleared the Path
Six weeks before the latest round of approvals, the agency finalized an amendment to Section 5.20 of the Code of Federal Regulations, the rule that governs how the OCC charters national banks and national trust banks. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPR, the formal public-comment document) went out on January 12. The final rule was issued on March 2. The amended language took effect April 1.
The substantive change was a phrase replacement. Where the prior regulation referenced “fiduciary activities” as the scope of permissible business for a national trust bank, the new text refers to “operations of a trust company and activities related thereto.” The agency described the revision as a clarification rather than an expansion, saying the regulation’s text was finally catching up to longstanding practice and to the statutory authority cited in OCC Corporate Decision #1365.
That description is the OCC’s load-bearing legal defense. If the operative phrase in the rule has always meant trust-company operations rather than only fiduciary work, then custody, settlement, and stablecoin reserve management can fit inside the charter without an obvious legal stretch. If the prior phrase meant fiduciary activities in the narrower trust-law sense, then the swap is an expansion the regulator pushed through by rulemaking rather than by congressional action, and the approvals sit on a foundation that turns on whether one rulemaking can rewrite the National Bank Act’s scope.
The Conference of State Banking Supervisors, the industry body for state regulators that charter most U.S. trust companies, raised foundational concerns about the structure during the comment window. Traditional bank trade associations have been more discreet in public, while pressing privately on access to Federal Reserve payment rails, which a national trust charter does not automatically confer.
What a Trust Charter Buys, and What It Does Not
A national trust charter is not a banking license in the deposit-taking sense. It also is not a free pass into the Federal Reserve’s plumbing. What it does buy is a single federal license that supersedes the state-by-state money-transmitter regime crypto firms have had to assemble over the past decade.
For a firm like Circle, the calculus is straightforward. Holding the reserves backing USDC inside a federally chartered trust company unifies oversight under one regulator, simplifies disclosures to corporate Treasury clients, and aligns with the GENIUS Act stablecoin framework Trump signed last July, which created the first federal regime for payment stablecoins. For Coinbase, the charter unlocks an institutional custody business that has been growing alongside the spot-exchange-traded-fund market without the patchwork of state trust licenses.
The license still has hard limits. A national trust charter does not:
- Allow the holder to accept Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC, the federal deposit-guarantee agency) insured retail deposits
- Grant direct access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window
- Grant automatic access to FedWire or FedNow payment rails without a separate master-account approval
- Permit traditional commercial lending as a primary line of business
That structural appeal is what makes the senator’s challenge consequential. If the records produced by next month show approvals granted on business plans that explicitly include lending, payment processing, or anything beyond custody and reserve management, the argument that the regulator is letting these firms operate as banks without supervising them as banks gets a documentary anchor. The trade press has been writing on the same question; Mind Cron’s earlier reporting on the OCC’s pace on bank-versus-crypto custody applications tracked how incumbent banks are pressing the same agency for symmetric authority on the custody side.
The Trump Records Request
The portion of the letter most likely to drive cable coverage is its demand for OCC communications touching the president, his family, and World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture associated with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. The senator framed those communications as material to whether the approvals were processed at arm’s length from political pressure, not as proof of any specific transaction.
Trump signed the GENIUS Act in July 2025, after a 2024 election cycle in which crypto-aligned political action committees ranked among the largest single-issue corporate spenders in House and Senate races. The administration has taken several explicit pro-crypto turns since: the OCC, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve have each rolled back guidance their predecessors issued restricting how banks could custody, hold, or process digital assets.
How the Industry Reads the Same Facts
Inside the firms named in the letter, the read on the senator’s challenge is that it confirms how much ground the industry has covered, rather than how shaky the ground is.
Circle, Ripple, and Paxos have been pursuing federal status for half a decade. Coinbase’s path ran through repeated rejections under the prior administration. The argument from industry counsel is that the rule revision did not invent new charter scope; it cleaned up a textual ambiguity that had been there since the chartering rule was first written, and the proper venue for objection was the comment window that closed in February, not a senator’s letter in May.
Trade groups supporting the charters argued in public comment that the trust route is a more transparent regulatory structure than the state-by-state money-transmitter system it replaces. Each state license has its own capital, audit, and reporting regime; consolidating that supervision under one federal regulator gives examiners a unified view of reserves and counterparties that no individual state authority can match.
What the named firms will not concede is the political-correspondence demand. Several have business with the White House on adjacent issues, including a Treasury Department stablecoin working group convened earlier this year, and they will resist any disclosure that pulls those interactions into the senator’s records request. Whether the OCC can split that hair, releasing application files while protecting White House correspondence, is the procedural question the agency’s lawyers are likely working through right now.
The regulator has not publicly responded to the letter. Whatever it produces, or declines to produce, by June 1 will be the next data point in a fight whose terms were set on April 1.
