Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm acquired by Stripe earlier this year, applied with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Tuesday for a national bank trust charter, according to co-founder Zach Abrams.
With the application, Bridge expands a list of companies lining up for chartering under the months-old Genius Act, which established a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins.
Since the Senate passed the Genius Act in June, several cryptocurrency firms – namely Circle, Paxos, Ripple and Coinbase – have applied for trust charters with the OCC.
Unlike a traditional bank charter, a trust charter would not allow Bridge to lend or to take insured deposits. But if its application is successful, Bridge could provide custody, stablecoin issuance and management of stablecoin reserves within a federal framework, rather than through state-issued money-transmitter licenses.
“We’ve long believed stablecoins will be a core, regulated financial building block,” Abrams wrote Tuesday on social media platform X. “This regulatory infrastructure will enable us to tokenize trillions of dollars and make this future possible.”
Anchorage Digital is the only crypto-native bank chartered by the OCC. While stablecoins “may have started as a bridge between crypto and fiat, [they] are now becoming core plumbing in the digital financial system,” Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley told Banking Dive in June.
Bridge’s charter application follows a “major inflection point for the stablecoin sector,” indicating that “the U.S. is finally moving toward federal recognition of digital dollar infrastructure,” a representative for decentralized exchange aggregator Astros, told Decrypt.
But not everyone supports the charters.
In a letter to the OCC in July, several bank industry trade groups pushed back against crypto firms’ attempts to gain national trust charters, urging the regulator to postpone decisions on several applications. The OCC has yet to grant any national trust charters this year.
A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment beyond Abrams’ X post. The OCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
