The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) has taken the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to federal court, arguing the bank regulator broke the law by letting crypto firms that neither take deposits nor act mainly as fiduciaries become national trust banks.
Filed Oct. 2 in the District of Columbia’s federal district court, the complaint names the OCC and Comptroller Jonathan Gould as defendants. By ICBA’s count, the OCC has granted full or conditional approval to 21 trust banks during the Trump administration, and at least 13 of them are crypto companies.
“The OCC’s decision to allow companies to obtain national trust bank charters to conduct substantial non-fiduciary activities exceeds the authority Congress granted the agency,” ICBA President and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey said in a statement.
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What ICBA Wants Vacated
The suit, brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, asks the court to declare unlawful and set aside three OCC actions: its National Bank Chartering final rule, published March 2, 2026; Interpretive Letter 1176, issued in January 2021; and the conditional charter the agency granted digital asset firm Protego in February 2026. ICBA also wants the OCC barred from using the rule or the letter to approve any other charter.
In ICBA’s reading of the National Bank Act, the OCC can charter only deposit-taking banks, bankers’ banks that serve other banks, and trust banks confined to fiduciary work. Crypto trust banks fit none of those, the group argues, yet they skip deposit insurance, Community Reinvestment Act duties and holding company supervision while their federal charters preempt many state consumer protection laws. ICBA calls the result a “gaping hole in financial regulation.”
Romero Rainey said Americans assume a bank with a federal charter comes with federal protections. “Digital assets held at a crypto firm operating under a national trust charter do not carry those important safeguards,” she said.
The complaint says two member banks with under $2.5 billion in assets apiece have each already lost business worth hundreds of thousands of dollars this year to crypto firms holding conditional OCC approval. It also says Protego’s first conditional approval, granted in 2021, expired in 2023, the same year the company cut more than half its staff.
The OCC’s Position
In the final rule itself, the OCC described its change as clarifying “the longstanding authority” of national trust banks to conduct non-fiduciary activities alongside fiduciary ones. Because Congress used different words in different provisions, the agency wrote, trust and fiduciary “must mean different things in the federal banking statutes.” The agency also noted that existing national trust banks already have close to $2 trillion in assets under custody or safekeeping.
Crypto companies that have pursued the charters include Circle, which won final approval for its national trust bank in July.
ICBA has also pushed back on crypto in Congress, joining other bank groups in urging senators to tighten stablecoin yield limits in the CLARITY Act, which stalled in a Senate procedural vote last month.
Related Listen: DEX in the City: Why the Supreme Court’s FTC Ruling Could Rewire Crypto Regulation
