Morgan Stanley has applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a de novo national trust bank charter to hold digital assets on behalf of clients. The public filing, received Feb. 18, lists the proposed entity as ‘Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, National Association.’ According to reports from Bloomberg and Forbes, the planned subsidiary would custody specified digital assets, execute purchases, sales, swaps and transfers to support client investment activity, and provide crypto staking services. A national trust bank charter permits fiduciary activities such as trust services, custody and asset safekeeping; ‘de novo’ indicates the bank would be newly created rather than acquired. This would be Morgan Stanley’s first trust charter focused specifically on crypto and comes amid a wave of similar applications — 14 de novo bank charter filings have been made in 2025 so far, and there are roughly 60 national trust banks supervised by the OCC in the U.S. The move follows a broader rush for crypto-related trust charters: in December the OCC conditionally approved five applicants (First National Digital Currency Bank, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos), and conditional approvals or filings have continued into 2025 for firms including Stripe-owned Bridge, Crypto.com and payments firm Payoneer. Morgan Stanley has accelerated other crypto initiatives recently: in January it named Amy Oldenburg to lead a new crypto unit, is recruiting for multiple digital-asset roles, and filed in January for spot Bitcoin and Solana ETFs and later for a staked Ether ETF. This report is intended to provide accurate, timely information; readers are encouraged to verify details independently.
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