The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has granted preliminary conditional approval for Agora National Trust Bank, a New York-based trust company that would put the stablecoin issuer’s core business under direct federal supervision. The decision, Corporate Decision #1393, is dated September 18 and was disclosed this week.
The proposed bank would operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Agora Atlas Corp., the company behind the AUSD stablecoin. According to the OCC letter, it would conduct limited purpose trust activities covering stablecoin issuance, custody and digital asset transaction services. The regulator has not yet authorized the bank to take deposits or begin operations, and preliminary approval does not itself permit any banking activity.
Preliminary approval comes with conditions. Agora must maintain at least $10 million in Tier 1 capital, submit financial statements prepared on an accrual basis under generally accepted accounting principles, and notify the OCC’s chartering staff at least 60 days before opening. The company must raise the required capital within 12 months and open for business within 18 months, or the approval expires. A preopening examination comes before final charter approval, and the OCC reserves the right to review any significant departure from the business plan it reviewed during the application process.
Stablecoin issuance and redemption at the bank must comply with the GENIUS Act and its implementing regulations. Final rules under that law are expected in November, according to reporting on a parallel charter granted to Bastion the same week. The GENIUS Act took effect in July 2025 and created the first federal framework for payment stablecoins, requiring issuers to hold reserves in high-quality liquid assets and submit to supervision.
Agora filed its charter application in April. The company runs the AUSD stablecoin, which it says has processed tens of billions of dollars in transfer volume, and holds a full license in Bermuda. In a blog post announcing the application, chief executive Nick van Eck framed the charter as a way to control the company’s own regulatory relationship rather than rent one. “You are the metal, or you lose,” he wrote, describing the company’s preference for owning its own infrastructure.
“Enterprises shouldn’t have to assemble a collection of vendors who don’t talk to each other,” Agora said in a statement describing the model it plans to build under the charter.
A national trust bank differs from a full commercial bank. It cannot take retail deposits. What it can do is hold fiduciary and custody assets under a national charter, which is why the structure has become the preferred vehicle for crypto custody and stablecoin reserves. Anchorage Digital became the first crypto firm to hold one in 2021, and the model has since spread across the industry as regulators warmed to digital asset custody under federal oversight.
Agora is one of three digital asset firms that received preliminary conditional trust charters on September 18, according to Forkast. Bastion Platforms National Trust Company received conditional approval under OCC letter No. 1391 to run white-label stablecoin issuance, custodial wallets and fiat-to-USDC conversion, and must obtain Federal Reserve Bank shares before formal operations. The third recipient was not named in initial reporting.
The approvals extend a run that began last winter. Circle received final approval for Circle National Trust on July 10, after conditional approval in December 2025. BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos also received conditional approval that December, putting the largest names in crypto custody inside the federal perimeter within a year.
Demand for charters has grown quickly. Comptroller Jonathan Gould said in August that the OCC had received 40 new bank charter applications over roughly the past 18 months, 23 of them from digital asset businesses, an eightfold increase over the previous four years. The jump tracks the passage of the GENIUS Act, which gave stablecoin issuers a clear federal path for the first time and made a national charter the cheapest way to operate across all 50 states.
A federal trust charter matters for issuers because it replaces a patchwork of state money transmitter licenses with a single national framework. It also lets a company hold customer reserves inside a regulated bank entity rather than through third-party custodians, an arrangement regulators have scrutinized since the GENIUS Act took effect. For institutional clients, the difference between holding reserves at a nationally chartered trust bank and holding them at a state-licensed entity is a due diligence question that increasingly decides vendor selection.
For Agora, the charter would tie together products it has been building: the stablecoin, an API for business payments, wallets and settlement tools. The company positions itself as infrastructure for cross-border payments and payroll, markets where traditional banks have been slow to move and where stablecoin volumes keep climbing. Agora argues that combining issuance, custody and software in one regulated entity removes integration work that enterprise customers now do themselves across multiple vendors.
The competition is already chartered or close to it. Circle operates under a final approval, Paxos and BitGo hold conditional ones, and banks backing rival issuers are building custody arms of their own. Agora’s bet is that a single regulated entity covering issuance, custody and payments software will appeal to enterprises that now stitch those services together separately.
The hard part starts now. Agora must satisfy the OCC’s requirements on management, directors, auditing arrangements and operational readiness before it can request a preopening examination, and the clock on the 18-month window is already running. If it misses either deadline, it would need an extension from the regulator to keep the application alive. The company has not given a target opening date.