Crypto’s Post-Charter Playbook Runs on Stablecoins and Asset Custody

The best money is often the biggest money. And while crypto scaled over the past decade by competing on consumer-facing products like exchanges, wallets, and trading apps, the sector’s future is shaping up to be a heavily institutional one, where the biggest value flows are.

A trust charter from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is what crypto firms have come to view as key to unlocking this future. The announcement earlier this spring that Kraken Financial, the Wyoming-chartered bank of the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange, was granted a Federal Reserve master account by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, only underscores the push the sector is making toward domestic legitimacy.

Crypto firms are set on competing with banks, and banks by nature are already chartered, enabling them, at least in theory, to offer issuance, custody and settlement solutions designed for digital assets.

News broke Monday (May 4), for example, that The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is planning a fall launch for its tokenization service.

The winners in this new crypto world may be those that can either look like banks and chartered financial institutions or already are one.

But with the OCC having issued over a dozen new charters in just the past six months, both conditional and full, to digital asset firms, it’s worth looking at what exactly they’ve been using them for in the meantime.

See also: The New FinTech Scorecard Starts With a Bank Charter

Chasing Crypto’s Dreams

Across firms pursuing trust charters, two capabilities dominate: custody and stablecoins. This is not coincidental. Both map cleanly onto the legal authorities granted under trust charters and address real institutional demand.

Custody, in particular, has emerged as a foundational service. Asset managers, banks and corporations require a regulated entity to safeguard digital assets — a role that trust-chartered firms can uniquely fulfill. Fidelity Digital Assets, which operates under a state trust structure and has pursued a federal charter, exemplifies how traditional financial players are converging on this model.

Stablecoins, meanwhile, have become the connective tissue between crypto and traditional finance. Circle has framed its pursuit of an OCC charter as a way to formalize oversight of the reserves backing its USDC stablecoin, aligning the product more closely with regulated financial instruments. Paxos, another early adopter of the trust structure, has similarly built its business around issuing and managing regulated stablecoins, while expanding into brokerage and settlement services.

More recently, in the days following its conditional OCC approval for a national trust charter this April, the crypto exchange Coinbase partnered with the cross-border platform Nium to use stablecoins as settlement rails.

The implication is that the next phase of growth may lie not in onboarding individual traders, but in embedding crypto into global payment and treasury systems. That degree of integration into highly sensitive enterprise workflows requires more of a legal backstop than crypto has until now been able to stand up.

Ripple provides another clear example. Following conditional approval for a national trust charter, Ripple has promoted enterprise use cases for its RLUSD stablecoin, including integrations with treasury management platforms like GTreasury.

See also: Stablecoins Grew Up. Now Come the Rules

Making Sense of What’s in a Charter

This “infrastructure-first” approach marks a departure from earlier crypto business models. It also aligns more closely with how traditional financial services scale, which is typically through partnerships, integrations, and white-label solutions rather than direct consumer engagement.

A bank charter “is not a trophy, and it certainly isn’t a product label, but it’s a public trust,” Rodney E. Hood, former acting comptroller of the currency, said in an interview with Competition Policy International, a PYMNTS company, in January.

“A federal charter should never be construed as an end run around supervision, and it should certainly never be a pathway to scale without accountability,” Hood added.

The implications extend beyond the crypto industry. As digital asset services become more integrated into banking, payments and corporate finance, they have the potential to reshape how money moves and is managed across the economy.

Regulation, as always, will have a key role to play in the future of the banking ecosystem. The PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi report “Chain Reaction: Regulatory Clarity as the Catalyst for Blockchain Adoption” found that blockchain’s next leap could be shaped by more by policy than by innovation.