The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has granted Coinbase conditional approval for a national bank trust charter after roughly six months of review. Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal announced the decision in an X post, noting it follows December OCC approvals for other crypto firms such as Ripple Labs, BitGo, Circle, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos.
Coinbase has repeatedly said it does not intend to become a bank if the charter is finalized. Greg Tusar, the company’s vice president of institutional product, emphasized that Coinbase will not operate as a commercial bank, will not take retail deposits, and will not engage in fractional reserve banking. He framed the charter as a route to federal regulatory uniformity for the company’s custody and market infrastructure offerings. Coinbase will also continue to operate under New York’s Department of Financial Services, where it holds a BitLicense and a state limited-purpose trust charter.
The OCC’s action comes amid ongoing regulatory debates that have affected broader industry legislation. Disputes over stablecoin yield language have delayed a digital asset market-structure bill in Congress; Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in January the exchange could not support the bill as written, and Senate Banking Committee lawmakers later postponed a planned markup.
As of publication, the OCC’s public application tracker still showed Coinbase’s filing as “received.” Cointelegraph contacted Coinbase for comment but had not received a response.
Separately, Coinbase is defending its recently launched U.S. prediction markets, created in January through a partnership with Kalshi. The company has filed preemptive lawsuits against gaming authorities in Connecticut, Illinois and Michigan, arguing that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — not state regulators — has jurisdiction over prediction markets; those cases remain ongoing.