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Senator Warren questions OCC crypto trust charters\u2019 legality under National Bank Act.<\/p>\n
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Senator Elizabeth Warren has accused the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) of potentially violating the National Bank Act by greenlighting a wave of national trust bank charters for cryptocurrency firms that she says are \u201cunqualified\u201d and operating far beyond what federal law allows. In a letter sent this week to Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould, the Massachusetts Democrat argued that the OCC\u2019s recent spree of crypto-related national trust charters \u201cconstitutes a clear violation of the National Bank Act\u201d because the recipients \u201cappear to far exceed the narrow scope of activities permitted by law.\u201d According to Bloomberg<\/a>, Warren said the agency has now approved at least nine such charters for digital asset companies that \u201cseem to be unqualified,\u201d and pressed Gould to explain whether his office properly applied statutory standards when evaluating their fitness to operate as national trust banks.<\/p>\n Warren framed the issue as a basic question of legality rather than policy discretion, writing that these crypto trusts \u201cappear to far exceed the narrow scope of activities permitted by law\u201d and therefore raise the prospect that the OCC is effectively rewriting the National Bank Act through chartering decisions. Her intervention comes just months after the OCC issued conditional approvals for five digital asset firms to operate as uninsured national trust banks focused on custody and settlement instead of deposits or lending, a development that has intensified debate over how far existing banking law can be stretched to accommodate digital assets. The senator\u2019s latest letter also questions whether the regulator adhered to all relevant legal provisions during the approval process and requests clarification on the compliance of the cryptocurrency companies in obtaining banking charters.<\/p>\n The OCC has spent the past year methodically opening federal trust routes for crypto firms, arguing that custody, settlement, and \u201criskless principal\u201d crypto-asset transactions fall within the business of banking when properly supervised under its existing authority. In December 2025, it confirmed that national banks may act as riskless principals in crypto-asset trades so long as positions are matched and not held in inventory, effectively blessing broker-like intermediation in digital assets under existing law. Industry advocates portray the trust charter route as a way to bring large-scale digital asset custody and settlement under a uniform federal supervisor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Warren, however, has repeatedly warned that handing national trust charters to crypto players without tight statutory grounding could entrench regulatory arbitrage and political favoritism at the core of the banking system. Her earlier clashes over high-profile charter bids have already highlighted concerns about the OCC\u2019s independence and the risk that crypto firms could gain banking privileges without commensurate safeguards. Gould has previously insisted that crypto charter reviews are \u201capolitical and nonpartisan,\u201d but Warren\u2019s new letter demands detailed documentation of the legal analyses underpinning each approval and an accounting of how the OCC concluded that these digital asset firms qualify as national trust banks under the National Bank Act. The confrontation now sets up a broader test of how far U.S. banking law can be pushed to accommodate crypto infrastructure before Congress is forced to clarify, or curtail, the OCC\u2019s authority.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Senator Warren questions OCC crypto trust charters\u2019 legality under National Bank Act. Summary Warren says OCC\u2019s crypto trust charters \u201cappear to far exceed\u201d limits under the National Bank Act. At…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9623,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29059,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29058\/revisions\/29059"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Warren targets OCC\u2019s crypto trust push<\/h2>\n
Broader fight over crypto in the banking system<\/h2>\n