The biggest names in American banking have a message for federal regulators: stop handing out banking licenses to crypto companies until Congress decides what the rules actually are.
Right now, a growing list of crypto firms — including Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Paxos, Coinbase, and Nomura’s Laser Digital — either hold or are actively seeking special banking licenses from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency that oversees national banks. Even World Liberty Financial, a firm linked to President Trump, recently applied for one to support its USD1 stablecoin. These licenses, known as OCC trust bank charters, would let crypto companies plug directly into the country’s core banking infrastructure, including the Federal Reserve’s payment systems.
The American Bankers Association, the industry’s most powerful lobbying group, sent a letter to the OCC on Wednesday pushing back hard against approving those applications, according to a report from Decrypt. The ABA argued that the agency should wait for lawmakers to finish writing the legal framework these companies would operate under. In particular, the group took aim at the OCC’s practice of approving charters based on compliance with the GENIUS Act — a stablecoin bill that hasn’t been fully implemented and still requires multiple agencies to finalize their own rules.
We’d love to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!
The ABA urged the OCC to “be patient, not measure its application decisioning progress against traditional timelines, and allow each charter applicant’s regulatory responsibilities to come fully into view before moving a charter application forward,” Decrypt reported.
Read more: Senate Committee Advances Crypto Regulation Bill, but Partisan Split Raises Doubts
The stakes here are enormous. If crypto firms get full banking charters, they could settle transactions natively — without relying on traditional banks as middlemen. That would cut out layers of the existing financial system, from SWIFT messaging to correspondent banking networks. It’s the kind of change that excites crypto advocates and terrifies incumbents.
The ABA also pointed to the collapses of FTX and Celsius in 2022 as cautionary tales. Those failures, the group argued, showed that new financial business models can implode in ways regulators are not yet equipped to handle. The lobby called on the OCC to make sure it has the tools to manage any potential insolvency from a chartered crypto company. It even pushed for a rule barring non-bank trust companies from using the word “bank” in their names, arguing it could mislead the public.
This isn’t a one-off complaint. The banking industry has been running a sustained campaign to slow crypto’s advance into federally regulated finance. Last month, the ABA’s community banking arm warned lawmakers that some crypto companies were already working around the GENIUS Act’s ban on paying interest on stablecoins by routing rewards through affiliated exchanges. That fight over stablecoin yield spilled into the broader crypto market structure bill, stalling negotiations entirely. Banks succeeded in getting language into the latest draft that would ban crypto firms from offering any form of return on stablecoin holdings. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pulled his support for the bill in response, calling it worse than the status quo.
The road ahead is likely to get messier. With the GENIUS Act still unfinished and multiple agencies yet to weigh in, the OCC faces pressure from both sides crypto companies eager to get inside the system and banks determined to keep them out. How the agency navigates that tension could shape the future of digital finance in America.
Add as Preferred Source