Ripple announced on Oct. 26 that its trust bank has received its final federal charter, creating a federally supervised entity to manage the reserves behind its RLUSD stablecoin.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) signed off on Ripple National Trust Bank (RNTB) about ten months after granting it conditional approval in December 2025. Ripple did not give a date for when the bank will start operating.
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What the Trust Bank Will Do
Under the plan the OCC approved, RNTB will handle the segregated reserve assets that back RLUSD and act as collateral trustee over them on behalf of people holding the token. Once open, it will also be cleared to offer fiduciary custody of digital assets to enterprise clients.
RLUSD issuance is not moving. The stablecoin will still be minted by Standard Custody & Trust Company, a Ripple subsidiary regulated as a limited purpose trust company by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). The new bank adds a layer of OCC supervision on top of that state oversight.
“For years, we’ve said crypto and banks work better together. Final approval for Ripple National Trust Bank is what that looks like in practice,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in the release. He added that a national trust charter “gives us an even stronger foundation for RLUSD and the institutional products we’re building across payments, custody and capital markets.”
Garlinghouse also posted the news on X ahead of Ripple’s Swell event, writing: “The revolution isn’t happening outside the system. It’s happening from within it.”
RLUSD’s Growth
Ripple launched RLUSD in December 2024, and the company puts its market cap at $2.5 billion today. At the time of the conditional approval last December, Ripple said the token had passed $1 billion.
BNY serves as the main custodian for RLUSD’s reserves, which Ripple says are fully backed by dollar deposits, government securities and cash equivalents. The company publishes monthly attestations from an independent third party covering the token’s circulating supply and reserve holdings.
Ripple said it will stay in contact with the OCC, NYDFS and other agencies as the bank gets up and running and as U.S. agencies put the GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin law signed in July 2025, into effect.
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