- The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has granted final approval for Ripple National Trust Bank, according to Ripple’s own announcement.
- The new bank will manage the reserves behind the RLUSD , act as collateral trustee for holders, and offer custody. It cannot take deposits or lend.
- RLUSD itself will still be issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company, Ripple’s New York-regulated entity. That part doesn’t move.
A bank charter sounds like the biggest thing that can happen to a crypto company, which is why today’s headlines all carry the word. What Ripple has actually been granted is narrower, and the gap between the two is where most readers will get this wrong.
If you hold XRP, nothing here changes what you own. This approval is about RLUSD, a separate dollar-pegged , and about who supervises the pot of assets sitting behind it. The charter doesn’t make RLUSD a bank deposit, doesn’t put it anywhere near government protection, and doesn’t give Ripple a licence to hold anybody’s cash.
For UK readers there’s a flatter point still: RLUSD is a US-facing product. It isn’t available to UK retail buyers in any meaningful way, and no FCA protection attaches to it.
What a national trust bank actually is
Banks in the US come in types. A full commercial bank takes deposits from customers and lends that money out, which is the business most people picture. A national trust bank doesn’t do either. It holds and administers assets on behalf of other people, under federal supervision from the OCC rather than a state regulator.
The Block reports that charters of this kind carry no deposit-taking or lending powers and are distinct from a full-service commercial bank licence. That distinction is doing most of the work in this story.
Ripple says the approved activities for Ripple National Trust Bank are three: managing the segregated reserves that back RLUSD, acting as collateral trustee of those reserves for RLUSD holders, and providing fiduciary digital asset custody. That’s the list.
The split that matters
RLUSD will continue to be issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company, a limited purpose trust company regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services. Issuance is not moving to the new federal entity.
So the structure ends up divided. New York still oversees the act of creating and redeeming the token. Washington now oversees the reserves behind it and the custody arm. Federal supervision has been added on top of state supervision rather than replacing it, which is a reasonable thing for Ripple to want and a less dramatic thing than “Ripple gets a bank”.
Ripple also says BNY is the primary custodian of the RLUSD reserves and that it publishes monthly independent third-party attestations of circulating supply and reserve assets. Both of those are company statements, as is the roughly $2.5bn it gives for RLUSD, which launched in December 2024.
Approved is not open
One line in the release is easy to skim past. Ripple says it will continue to work closely with the OCC as the new bank “begins operations”. The bank has permission to exist. It is not yet running.
The approval follows conditional sign-off in December 2025, after an application The Block says was filed in July 2025. Ripple’s chief executive Brad Garlinghouse, quoted in the company’s own press release, said: “For years, we’ve said crypto and banks work better together.” That is framing from an interested party rather than a finding, and the release leans hard on it, describing the moment as pivotal for digital assets in the United States.
Our sourcing on the regulator’s side is Ripple’s. We did not locate an OCC publication confirming the approval directly, so the claim that the OCC announced this rests on the company’s characterisation of it, repeated by The Block, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph and The Defiant.
Not the first, and that’s the context
Ripple joins a queue. The Block reports Circle received final OCC trust bank approval in July 2026 and BitGo in December 2025, with Coinbase, Crypto.com and World Liberty Financial holding conditional approvals. A trust charter is becoming the standard structure for a US stablecoin issuer rather than a competitive edge.
That wave has drawn political fire. Senator Elizabeth Warren has criticised the OCC’s crypto trust charters as inconsistent with the National Bank Act, a characterisation the industry group The Digital Chamber rejects, according to The Block’s reporting of the dispute.
What to watch
Whether RNTB actually opens, and when. A charter that sits unused for a year says something different from one that’s operating by spring.
Then the GENIUS Act timetable from January, which sets federal rules for payment stablecoins in the US. Companies that spent 2025 and 2026 collecting trust charters were positioning for that deadline, and the real test is whether holding one turns out to matter commercially or whether it simply becomes the cost of entry. If you want the policy thread, that’s the one worth following.