- World Liberty Financial has conditional approval for a national trust company charter, under a proposed entity called World Liberty Trust Company.
- If it becomes final, that entity would take over issuance of the USD1 stablecoin from BitGo, which handles it today.
- A trust charter is not a normal bank licence. There is no deposit insurance behind it, and conditional approvals can lapse if the conditions aren’t met.
The company behind the USD1 stablecoin has been given conditional approval to run its own federally chartered trust company. If that approval turns into a final one, World Liberty Financial would take over issuing the from BitGo, the firm doing that job now.
Why this matters to you: a dollar stablecoin is only worth a dollar because someone can be relied on to hand you a real dollar back. At the moment two separate companies stand behind that promise for USD1. This change would put both jobs inside one group.
That isn’t automatically worse. Plenty of large issuers run exactly that way. But it removes an outside party from the arrangement, and if you hold the token, knowing who is holding the money and who is checking them is the whole question.
What was actually approved
A national trust company charter is granted by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal regulator that licenses national banks in the United States. Several crypto firms have applied for one over the past two years, because it replaces a patchwork of state-by-state money transmitter licences with a single federal permission.
Conditional means the regulator has said yes in principle and attached requirements: capital levels, staffing, systems, compliance controls, that sort of thing. The applicant has to satisfy them before the charter goes live. Conditional approvals are normal, and they are also not the finish line. They can be extended, altered, or left to expire.
So nothing has changed for anyone holding USD1 today. BitGo still issues it. What has changed is that a route exists for that to move.
What a trust charter gives you, and what it doesn’t
This is the part most coverage skips, and it’s where readers get the wrong idea.
A trust company holds and administers assets on behalf of other people. It is not a deposit-taking bank. It doesn’t take your savings, it doesn’t lend them out, and crucially it doesn’t come with federal deposit insurance. If you have money in a US bank, up to $250,000 of it is guaranteed by the government if the bank fails. Nothing about a trust charter extends that to a stablecoin holder.
What it does give you is federal supervision: examinations, capital rules, reporting obligations, a regulator with the power to intervene. That is meaningfully more oversight than an unlicensed issuer faces. It is not a government guarantee that you get your dollar back, and anyone who tells you a charter makes a stablecoin “government-backed” has skipped a step. If the mechanics of how a token holds its peg are new to you, our stablecoin explainer covers that from the ground up.
The BitGo handover is the detail to notice
Right now, issuance and custody of USD1 sit with BitGo, a regulated custody firm that is a separate business from World Liberty Financial. Under the proposal, the new trust company takes on issuance.
When the issuer and the custodian are different companies, the custodian is a second set of hands on the reserves and a second party with its own licence to lose. When they sit inside the same group, that check becomes an internal one, backed by whatever the regulator requires and whatever the auditor confirms. Both structures exist across the industry and both can be run properly. They are just not the same structure, and the switch is the substance of this story rather than the charter itself.
Where the GENIUS Act sets the floor
The GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law passed last year, already sets the baseline for any payment stablecoin sold to Americans: reserves held one-for-one in cash and short-term government debt, kept separate from the company’s own money, with regular public disclosure of what’s in the pot.
A federal trust charter is one of the recognised paths to operating under that regime rather than an exemption from it. So the reserve rules apply either way. What the charter changes is who supervises the issuer and how directly.
The political backdrop is hard to ignore. World Liberty Financial is connected to the family of the sitting president, and the approval comes from a federal agency inside his administration. That is a fact about the structure, not a claim about anyone’s conduct, and it is the reason this particular application will get read more closely than the others in the queue. Separately, Trump and the heads of the SEC and CFTC are expected to meet crypto and prediction-market executives at the White House on Wednesday, with the broader CLARITY Act market-structure bill now given roughly a 10% chance of passing this year.
What to watch
Three things. Whether the conditions attached to the approval are made public, because that’s the only way to judge how demanding they are. Whether a date is announced for issuance actually moving across, and what happens to the reserves on that day. And the first reserve attestation published after the handover, under the new issuer, which is the first hard evidence anyone outside the company will get.