Block, Jack Dorsey’s payments company, applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Builders Bank & Trust, a national trust bank that would hold bitcoin and stablecoins for customers under federal supervision. The application, filed Tuesday and confirmed in a company press release, would create an uninsured national trust bank. It would not accept deposits or make loans. Its business is custody and fiduciary services for digital assets, the unglamorous plumbing that has become one of the most contested prizes in US crypto regulation this year.
Who is behind it and what it would do
Builders Bank would be led by Lee Woolley, Block’s digital asset strategy lead, who previously ran the Treasury Department Federal Credit Union and held senior roles at Northern Trust. The bank would operate on a federal framework rather than a patchwork of state licenses as Block’s crypto custody business scales. “Building on Block’s experience in the digital asset space, our history with Square Financial Services and the deep banking expertise of the team we’ve assembled, we believe Builders Bank is well positioned to support Block’s broader vision of economic empowerment,” Woolley said in the release. Block runs Square and Cash App, both of which let users buy and hold bitcoin, and the company has been building out self-custody wallets and bitcoin mining hardware. A federal trust charter puts the storage layer for all of that under the OCC’s direct oversight.
A crowded field
Block is late to a queue that has moved quickly. The OCC has granted conditional or final approvals this year to Circle, which opened First National Digital Currency Bank in July; Coinbase, whose Coinbase National Trust Company charter was approved in April to take over its custody business; and Ripple, BitGo, Paxos, Fidelity and Bridge, among others. The volume of applications is itself new. Comptroller Jonathan Gould said in August that the OCC had received 40 de novo bank applications in 18 months, after receiving just 48 in the entire period from 2011 through 2024. “De novo chartering is a sign of a healthy banking system,” Gould said.
| Applicant | Charter focus | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Block (Builders Bank & Trust) | Bitcoin and stablecoin custody | Applied September 8 |
| Circle | USDC custody, reserve management | Approved July 2026 |
| Coinbase | Institutional digital asset custody | Approved April 2026 |
| Ripple, BitGo, Paxos, Fidelity, Bridge | Custody and stablecoin services | Conditional approvals |
Why the charter race matters
A national trust charter does three things a state trust license does not. It puts the custodian under one federal regulator, which institutional clients prefer. It signals permanence to counterparties weighing long-term custody contracts. And it positions the holder well if the CLARITY Act, the market structure bill facing a Senate cloture vote on September 15, passes and codifies which agency watches which corner of the crypto market. The GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law passed last year, expressly recognized that uninsured national banks can issue payment stablecoins, and more than a dozen implementing rules have been proposed though none finalized. Fintech lawyers have described charters as tools that now shape how crypto companies build compliance and business models, not just regulatory paperwork. The regulatory climate flipped from the prior years, when banking regulators warned institutions away from crypto. The OCC’s Interpretive Letter 1183 in March 2025 reaffirmed that custody, stablecoin activity and node verification networks are permissible for national banks, and withdrew the prior requirement for supervisory nonobjection.
What happens next
OCC trust charter applications typically go through a public comment period and a conditional approval stage before full approval, a process that has taken the recent crypto applicants between several months and two years. Block’s application lands in that queue behind institutions that already got their conditional stamps. For Block, the charter is less about new products than about consolidating what it already offers under one regulator, with an eye on stablecoin payments, an area where the company has experimented but not committed at scale. If approved, Builders Bank would become the latest sign that digital asset custody has moved from a crypto-native niche to a federally chartered banking business.
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