OpenReserve Bank, a crypto-native lender backed by Andreessen Horowitz, has won preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to charter a full-service national bank in Salt Lake City, Utah. The approval landed on September 2, just under five months after the company filed its application.
The decision matters because of the route OpenReserve chose. Most crypto firms seeking a federal banking foothold have gone for national trust charters, which allow custody and some fiduciary services but not insured deposits or conventional lending. OpenReserve went for the full national bank charter instead, the harder path, and the OCC granted it. If the company reaches final approval, it will operate under the same core banking rules as any national bank, with a crypto-native product line built on top.
The numbers attached
The approval comes with specific conditions. OpenReserve must raise at least $210 million in initial paid-in capital, net of organizational costs, and hold a Tier 1 leverage ratio of at least 12% through its first three years of operation. That ratio is well above the minimums required of established banks, a sign the OCC wants the balance sheet thick before real deposits flow.
The deadlines are tight. The company has until September 2027 to raise the $210 million and until March 2028 to open for business. Miss either mark and the preliminary approval expires, and the process would start over. For a de novo bank, raising that much capital in a year is a real fundraising exercise, not a formality.
Who is behind it
OpenReserve raised a $25 million seed round led by a16z crypto, with Jump Capital, Acrew, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, Clocktower, Quona, AAF Management and Zero Knowledge Ventures also participating, The Block reported. The founders are Diwakar Choubey and Richard Correia, who previously built and ran MoneyLion, a consumer fintech that went public through a SPAC merger and later sold to Gen Digital in a deal worth roughly $1 billion.
Choubey framed the full charter choice as deliberate. In a statement announcing the approval, he said: “We chose the national bank path deliberately.” A full national bank charter lets OpenReserve, once it clears final approval, take insured deposits and write loans while also issuing stablecoins, Decrypt reported. Trust charters, by contrast, leave a firm dependent on partner banks for the deposit side of the business, which is exactly the dependency crypto firms have complained about since the 2023 banking turmoil cut off their access to traditional lenders.
a16z crypto put its investment logic bluntly in a blog post: “We need a bank that’s always on, always open, always available. A bank that never closes.”
What the bank would do
The business plan centers on tokenized deposits, treasury management, foreign correspondent banking and a banking-as-a-service platform for institutional clients. A planned subsidiary would handle stablecoin issuance. The timing follows the GENIUS Act, which created a federal framework for stablecoins and made a bank subsidiary one of the compliant paths for issuing them.
Tokenized deposits are the more interesting product. Unlike stablecoins, which are separate tokens issued by a non-bank or a subsidiary, tokenized deposits are claims on the bank itself, moved over blockchain rails. For institutional clients the pitch is instant settlement and programmable payments without leaving the insured deposit base. Treasury management over always-on rails would let corporate clients move idle cash between yield positions at any hour, the same argument fintechs have made about money market sweep accounts, just settled on-chain.
The foreign correspondent banking line is aimed at a different pain point. Cross-border payments for banks in smaller jurisdictions run through correspondent relationships that have been shrinking for a decade as big US banks pulled back. OpenReserve’s plan is to offer those services on shared digital asset rails, settling in tokenized money instead of waiting days for wire transfers to clear.
The banking-as-a-service piece rounds out the plan. OpenReserve would let other fintechs and midsize firms embed accounts and payment functions without each one building its own charter, compliance stack or core banking contract, a market that has churned since the Synapse collapse showed what happens when the intermediary holding the deposits fails.
A faster, busier OCC
Five months from application to preliminary approval is fast by OCC standards. The same week, the OCC also granted Revolut preliminary conditional approval for a national bank based in Connecticut. Comptroller Jonathan Gould has cast both decisions as part of a push to widen the charter pipeline rather than leave fintech firms in state-by-state licensing limbo.
The application itself was filed in April 2026 and is public on the OCC’s website. It names OpenReserve Bank, National Association, with its main office in Salt Lake City, and lays out a Community Reinvestment Act plan based on a strategic approach rather than standard assessment areas, a structure the OCC must approve separately after preliminary approval.
For the crypto industry, the approval is the clearest signal yet that a crypto-native firm can clear the full national bank bar, not just the lighter trust route. For OpenReserve, the hard part is still ahead: raising $210 million in a venture market that has grown selective, standing up full compliance and risk infrastructure from scratch, then opening doors by March 2028. Final approval will depend on hitting every condition the OCC attached, and on the bank’s regulators believing the deposit side is safe before the crypto side scales.
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