Block, the payments company behind Square and Cash App, has applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to charter Builders Bank & Trust, a national trust bank that would custody bitcoin and stablecoins under federal supervision. The application, filed September 8, would replace a patchwork of more than 50 state money transmitter licenses with a single federal framework. Block announced the filing in a press release the same day.
What Builders Bank would be
Builders Bank would be an uninsured, non-deposit-taking trust bank. It would not accept deposits or make loans. Its only business is custody and fiduciary services for digital assets, including bitcoin and stablecoins. That narrow scope matters for the regulatory math: FDIC deposit insurance never applied because client assets sit in custody, not on the bank’s balance sheet. What the charter adds is a federal capital requirement, governance standards and OCC examination authority.
Lee Woolley, Block’s digital asset strategy lead, would serve as president and CEO. He previously ran the Treasury Department Federal Credit Union and held senior roles at Northern Trust and BNY Mellon. “We look forward to working with the OCC as we pursue a charter designed to support the secure custody of assets for Block and its customers,” Woolley said in the announcement.
The leadership team is deliberately staffed with traditional banking credentials rather than crypto-native names. That is a signal about who the bank is meant to reassure. Institutional allocators, corporate treasurers and auditors tend to trust examiners they recognize, and an OCC charter carries a federal examiner relationship that no state license can replicate.
Why one license beats fifty
Block currently runs its bitcoin custody across more than 50 state money transmitter licenses. Each one carries its own compliance regime, renewal cycle and set of state examiners. The cost is not only administrative. Divergent state rules mean a product feature legal in one state can require redesign in another, and multistate examinations pull engineering and legal staff into recurring audits year after year. A national trust charter collapses all of it into one supervisor. TFTC reported that the filing is part of a confirmed wave of firms building federal custody infrastructure: Circle received final OCC approval in July, and Ripple, Paxos, BitGo and Fidelity Digital Assets all hold conditional approvals.
The OCC has already signaled where it stands. In June the agency issued Interpretive Letter 1192, confirming that a federally chartered bank may conduct authorized activities in any state without a state money transmitter license. That letter is what makes the charter strategy viable for crypto custody at scale. Without it, a national charter would still have to negotiate with every state individually, and the whole point would collapse.
A crowded but young field
If approved, Builders Bank would compete directly with Fidelity Digital Assets and Coinbase Custody for institutional mandates. Coinbase Custody holds the largest share of exchange-traded fund assets, but the trust-charter cohort is growing quickly. Circle’s full approval in July showed the OCC is willing to finish what it starts with crypto firms, and Revolut cleared a conditional stage for a US bank charter on September 2. Block is the largest consumer payments company to join the queue.
The pitch to institutions that have stayed on the sidelines over custodian risk is straightforward: a federally examined trust bank, with capital and governance requirements, rather than a state-licensed money transmitter. For corporate treasurers holding bitcoin on balance sheets, the difference matters in board presentations and audit letters. Custody by a federally chartered trust bank is an easier line to defend than custody by a state-licensed subsidiary.
Why the timing makes sense
The filing lands in the middle of a regulatory season that rewards it. Stablecoin legislation moved through Congress this year and gave issuers a federal path. The SEC has proposed letting blockchains serve as official share ledgers, a change that would push tokenized securities into mainstream volume. Corporate bitcoin treasuries keep accumulating. Every one of those businesses needs custody, and custody is the layer where a failure is unrecoverable. An uninsured trust bank with no deposits and no loans has a narrow balance sheet, which is exactly the shape regulators prefer for this work.
There is also a competitive angle closer to home. Cash App’s bitcoin revenue has been under pressure as trading volumes normalized, and owning regulated custody infrastructure lets Block serve institutional clients it currently cannot. Square Financial Services, Block’s existing industrial bank, gives the company a track record with federal banking regulators. Builders Bank extends that relationship into digital assets rather than starting from zero.
What happens next
Approval is not guaranteed. The application remains subject to OCC review, and Builders Bank cannot begin operations until the charter is granted. Recent history suggests the review is measured in months, not weeks. But the direction of travel is clear: conditional approvals are stacking up, Circle’s is final, and the OCC has chartered two new national banks in the first week of September alone.
For Cash App users nothing changes immediately. The charter affects the institutional plumbing behind Block’s bitcoin business, not the retail interface. The real test is whether the OCC moves at the pace it set with Circle and Revolut. If it does, Block’s 50-state compliance problem starts shrinking sometime next year, and the institutional custody market gets one more well-funded competitor with a household name behind it.