Crypto.com Approved To Launch US Federal Crypto Bank

OCC conditional approval: Crypto.com’s federal trust bank plan

Crypto.com said its planned entity, Foris Dax National Trust Bank, would operate as Crypto.com National Trust Bank and serve as a federally regulated “qualified custodian” for digital assets once it meets the OCC’s conditions and completes the chartering process, according to its company announcement.

Market snapshot: CRO traded around $0.074, down about 1.5% over 24 hours, while bitcoin traded around $64,193. Global data put total crypto market cap around $2.29 trillion.

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek framed the decision as a compliance-driven expansion. “This conditional approval is the latest testament to both our commitment to compliance and to sustainable growth,” he said in the company’s announcement.

The OCC’s own licensing tracker lists Crypto.com’s Foris Dax application as filed in October 2025 and approved on a conditional basis on Feb. 23, 2026, in its digital assets licensing applications table. The company did not disclose when the bank will begin operations.

Crypto.com said it submitted its application in October 2025 and that the conditional approval does not change the operations of its existing New Hampshire-regulated Crypto.com Custody Trust Company, which it described as a qualified custodian, according to the same announcement.

The decision also follows a wave of OCC conditional approvals for national trust bank charters in late 2025, including approvals for Ripple and Circle and conversions involving BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos, according to an OCC news release.

The application lands as both banks and crypto platforms jockey to control the next layer of dollar rails. We laid out the bank side of that push in our recent look at banks moving on stablecoins.

What a national trust bank charter enables (and limits)

Crypto.com’s charter path is not the same thing as launching a full-service retail bank. The OCC has said that most national trust banks do not accept deposits or make loans and typically do not carry FDIC insurance, according to OCC Bulletin 2007-21.

In practice, this is about the most regulated version of crypto plumbing: custody, fiduciary-style controls, and institutional workflows that large allocators and corporate treasuries can audit. Crypto.com said the charter is designed to support custody, staking across multiple networks, and trade settlement, but it emphasized that it must satisfy conditions before the charter is fully operational, according to its announcement.

That framing also explains why these charters can look like a quiet rebellion. For years, crypto platforms had to rent access to the banking perimeter. Now the industry is attempting to wear the perimeter, turning regulation into product surface area instead of a back-office constraint.

Regulation as trap and opportunity in the “bank takeover” race

This is the contrarian part of the U.S. crackdown narrative. A federal trust charter can harden a platform’s credibility with institutions, but it can also narrow what the platform is allowed to do, where it can take risk, and how it markets returns, all while inviting a deeper supervisory relationship.

That tension is already visible in Washington’s fight over who gets to offer yield on digital dollars. The same week regulators and firms chase federal charters, White House talks over stablecoin rewards remain stuck, as we reported in our coverage of the stablecoin yield stalemate.

The charter push is also arriving while lawmakers try to draw cleaner lanes for market structure. The broader debate around H.R. 3633 and SEC vs. CFTC jurisdiction is still unsettled, and we broke down the moving timeline in our market-structure explainer.

What comes next is procedural, not philosophical. Crypto.com must satisfy the OCC’s conditions and complete onboarding before opening the bank, while Congress decides whether it delivers clearer rules or another delay, such as the postponed Senate Banking markup. For readers tracking the full regulatory map across agencies, we keep an updated guide to the moving pieces in our 2026 U.S. policy overview.