Coinbase has received final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to run a national trust bank, per Bloomberg, which reported on 9 November that Coinbase said the regulator fully signed off on the charter last week. The OCC itself has not yet posted the final decision.
The OCC’s preliminary approval in April set a $60 million minimum of tier 1 capital for Coinbase National Trust Company. By our count of the OCC’s letters since December 2025, that ties for the highest floor among 16 digital-asset trust-bank approvals and is about 16% of their combined $363.95 million, by our arithmetic.
Business Pill · Agentic Commerce Explained
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on agentic commerce. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Coinbase or its charter.
The key insight:Coinbase’s national trust bank moves to final approval, per Bloomberg, with the April letter’s $60 million tier 1 capital floor, the joint-highest of 16 digital-asset trust-bank approvals in the OCC’s letters since December 2025 and about 16% of their combined $363.95 million, by our arithmetic.
Bloomberg’s Olga Kharif reported that the license, approved last week by the OCC, will help Coinbase grow its custody business and move deeper into areas such as payments, according to its application to the regulator.
It could also let Coinbase issue its own stablecoins and help other crypto firms issue and manage theirs, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report spread on X through a post by @StockMKTNewz at 11:45 UTC.
Minimum tier 1 capital the OCC set in each of its 16 digital-asset national trust-bank approvals with letters dated 12 December 2025 to 18 September 2026, in $ millions. Coinbase National Trust Company ($60 million, 2 April 2026) ties Connectia Trust for the highest. Source: OCC Conditional Approvals #1353 to #1359 and Corporate Decisions #1365 to #1393. The count and the $363.95 million total are our arithmetic.
What the April Approval Set Out
The OCC granted Coinbase National Trust Company “preliminary conditional approval” on 2 April 2026, in Corporate Decision #1370. The letter said final approval to commence business “will not be granted until all preopening requirements are met”.
The bank plans to provide digital asset custody services as a fiduciary, “primarily for institutional clients”, the letter says. Today that custody runs through Coinbase Custody Trust Company, a New York trust company chartered by the state’s Department of Financial Services.
The letter states: “Coinbase will migrate the entirety of this custody business from CCTC to the Bank over the three-year de novo period.” Custody clients can reach Coinbase’s staking, Prime Trading and Prime Financing through affiliates, with the bank acting as a finder rather than providing those services itself.
Condition four requires “a minimum of $60 million in tier 1 capital”, with at least half of it, or $30 million if greater, in eligible liquid assets. “The Bank will not be an insured depository institution”, the OCC wrote.
Sixteen Digital-Asset Trust Banks in the OCC’s Letters
The OCC’s Interpretations and Decisions table lists 19 national trust-bank decisions in letters dated from 12 December 2025 to 18 September 2026. By our reading of each letter, 16 approve banks for digital-asset custody or stablecoin activity. Two (UKG and Interactive) do not involve digital assets, and one was a denial, for Wise National Trust.
The five letters of 12 December 2025 cover BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, Ripple and First National Digital Currency Bank, proposed by Circle. The other 11 came in 2026, Coinbase’s among them.
Coinbase and Connectia Trust carry the highest capital floor among the 16, at $60 million each. Morgan Stanley Digital Trust follows at $50 million and Bridge National Trust Bank at $45 million. Bastion Platforms, a state trust company converting to a national charter, has the lowest, at $6 million.
Every one of the 16 letters is a preliminary conditional or conditional approval. None of the 16 has a final approval listed in that table, so our count cannot say how many have since opened for business.
The queue is still growing. The OCC’s digital-asset licensing page still lists 16 applications, by our count, the newest being Galaxy National Bank, received on 26 October. Two on that list, Morgan Stanley Digital Trust and Laser Digital, already hold preliminary conditional approvals.
As we read the April letter, the charter is a custody migration first: Coinbase committed to move the entirety of its New York-chartered custody business into the national bank over three years, while staking and trading stay with affiliates.
OCC Corporate Decision #1370, 2 April 2026
“Coinbase will migrate the entirety of this custody business from CCTC to the Bank over the three-year de novo period.”
Three Implications
FOR INSTITUTIONAL CUSTODY CLIENTS The April letter says the bank will serve primarily institutional clients and take over custody from Coinbase’s New York trust company over three years.
FOR STABLECOINS Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the charter could let Coinbase issue its own stablecoins and serve other issuers.
FOR THE QUEUE The OCC’s licensing page still lists 16 digital-asset applications, by our count, the newest received on 26 October.
The framework says software is being rebuilt so that “the agent is the consumer, and the human is the principal”, and names a “Trust Layer” covering “Agent identity-as-buyer, audit trails, attestation, capability scoping.”
As we read it, a federally chartered custodian is one candidate for that trust layer when agents hold and move stablecoins. The OCC letter does not mention agents, nor does the part of Bloomberg’s report we could read, and the framework does not discuss Coinbase.
What Is Not Established
The final approval rests on Bloomberg’s report of what Coinbase said. Shortly before 16:00 UTC on 9 November, the OCC’s 2026 news-release list carried no Coinbase release, and the Coinbase blog’s latest OCC post was April’s conditional approval. We could not read the full Bloomberg article, which is paywalled.
The capital and liquidity figures are the April conditions; whether the final approval changed them is not public. The stablecoin plans come from people familiar with the matter, as Bloomberg reported, not from Coinbase or the OCC.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
The Great Convergence of Capital, Power, and Geopolitics
This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a supply story, and last week as a credit story. This week it was priced as a permission story, and the answer arrived as a cost, not a ban.
Coinbase’s trust bank moves from a preliminary approval with a $60 million capital floor, joint-highest among 16 digital-asset trust-bank approvals in the OCC’s letters by our count, to final approval, per Bloomberg. The OCC’s licensing page still lists 16 digital-asset applications.
A note on sourcing. The final approval is as Bloomberg reported Coinbase saying it on 9 November 2026; the OCC had not posted it when we checked. Capital conditions and dates come from the OCC’s decision letters dated 12 December 2025 to 18 September 2026; we read the Coinbase letter in full and the capital condition of each of the others. The counts of 19 decisions, 16 digital-asset approvals and 16 pending applications, the $363.95 million total and the 16% share are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
