- Block Inc. (Jack Dorsey’s fintech company) has applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Builders Bank & Trust, an uninsured national trust bank that would provide custody and fiduciary services for Bitcoin, stablecoins, and other digital assets — but would not take deposits or make loans, making it a pure-play digital asset custody vehicle rather than a full-service bank.
- The OCC has already granted trust-bank charter approvals to entities tied to Ripple and World Liberty Financial (the Trump family’s crypto venture), signaling an active and receptive regulatory posture toward crypto-native banking applications under the current administration — a stark reversal from the prior regulatory cycle that made bank charters nearly impossible for crypto firms to obtain.
- Block brings meaningful credibility to this application: the company operates Square Financial Services (an industrial bank), has deep payments infrastructure through Cash App and Square, and has been one of the most prominent corporate Bitcoin holders and advocates — giving it a compliance and operational track record that pure-play crypto startups typically lack.
- Lee Woolley, named as prospective president and CEO of Builders Bank, said the application builds on “Block’s experience in the digital asset space, our history with Square Financial Services, and the deep banking expertise of the team” — framing the charter as infrastructure for Block’s broader “economic empowerment” mission rather than a standalone financial services business.
What Happened?
Block Inc. applied to the OCC to establish Builders Bank & Trust, a proposed uninsured national trust bank that would custody Bitcoin, stablecoins, and other digital assets. Unlike a traditional bank, Builders Bank would not accept deposits or issue loans — it would function as a regulated custodian and fiduciary for digital assets, providing institutional-grade safekeeping infrastructure under a federal regulatory framework. The OCC has been actively approving similar applications from crypto-native firms under the current administration, representing a significant policy shift from the prior cycle in which crypto companies were largely unable to obtain federal banking charters.
Why It Matters?
A federal trust charter does something that state-level licenses and informal custody arrangements cannot: it creates a nationally recognized, federally regulated entity that institutional investors, pension funds, and corporate treasurers can use as counterparty under their own fiduciary obligations. The inability of crypto firms to obtain this status was one of the key structural barriers to institutional capital deployment into digital assets. With Block, Ripple, and World Liberty Financial all obtaining or applying for federal charters simultaneously, the infrastructure for large-scale institutional crypto custody is being built out in real time. For Block specifically, a federal trust charter would allow Cash App and Square’s Bitcoin operations to graduate from a patchwork of state money-transmitter licenses into a single, federally regulated framework — dramatically reducing compliance complexity and potentially allowing Block to offer custody services to institutions that can’t use unlicensed custodians.
What’s Next?
OCC approval is the key gating event. The OCC has been approving crypto charter applications, but the process is not automatic and typically involves examination of capitalization, AML/BSA controls, and management qualifications. If approved, Builders Bank would be among the first federally chartered crypto custodians at scale alongside Ripple’s entity. The broader trend — crypto firms acquiring or building regulated banking infrastructure — is accelerating and represents a structural integration of crypto into the traditional financial system that was the theoretical end-state of the asset class from the beginning but is only now becoming operationally real at the federal level.
Source: Bloomberg
