- The OCC granted preliminary conditional approval to World Liberty Trust Company as a national trust bank.
- WLTC would run issuance, redemption, custody and reserve management for the USD1 stablecoin itself.
- The charter arrives inside a wider OCC approval wave that began in December 2025.
- Senate Democrats have responded with legislation and the Clarity Act has lost momentum.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency cleared World Liberty Financial on August 14 to organize a national trust bank, World Liberty Trust Company, under a preliminary conditional approval. The application went in back in January. Approving it puts a company that is 38% owned by a Trump family entity under the direct supervision of a federal banking regulator. Nothing opens yet. WLTC still has to clear a pre-opening examination and satisfy every condition attached to the charter letter before it can operate.
What the charter actually lets WLTC do, and what it forbids
A national trust charter is not a banking licence in the sense most readers assume. WLTC cannot take FDIC-insured deposits, and it cannot write commercial or consumer loans. Hold the reserves, mint and burn the token, custody assets for institutions. That is the whole mandate.
That narrowness is the point. USD1, currently around $4 billion in circulation, down from a peak above $5 billion earlier this year, depends on New York-listed custodian BitGo to hold and administer its reserves. Under the charter, World Liberty removes that dependency and performs the function itself, with the OCC rather than a commercial counterparty sitting on the other side of the relationship. The company has said it intends to offer issuance and redemption of USD1 without fees, which matters most during stress episodes, when redemption costs at competing issuers rise precisely as holders want out. Circle’s USDC is the obvious target.
The regulatory floodgates opened eight months before this decision
Treating the World Liberty approval as an isolated favour misreads what has happened at the OCC under Comptroller Jonathan Gould. In December 2025 the agency conditionally approved five crypto and fintech national trust charters on a single day, covering Circle, which operates as First National Digital Currency Bank, along with Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos. Foris DAX, the Crypto.com entity, followed in February 2026, as did Bridge National Trust Bank. Applications from Coinbase, EDX Trust and Revolut remain in the pipeline.
The mechanism behind the wave is a rule the OCC finalized in February 2026 and brought into force on April 1. The agency swapped one phrase for another in its chartering rule, widening ‘fiduciary activities’ into the operations of a trust company and anything related to them. Read as plumbing, it sounds trivial. In practice it converted standalone custody and stablecoin mechanics from questionable adjacent business into core chartered activity, which is the legal basis on which every application in this cohort rests.
The volume tells the same story. Between 2008 and 2025 the OCC approved roughly three new banks a year. In 2026, after a May executive order pushed the agency to streamline fintech approvals, it has already cleared 15 applicants, and Gould told Congress the OCC is open for business again.
The promises Eric Trump had to sign before the approval went through
The agency clearly understood how the decision would read. Eric Trump and two other indirect investors signed legally binding passivity commitments, promising not to seek board seats, not to influence management decisions and not to use material non-public information about the bank. Any equity position above 9.9% must have its voting rights proxied to the bank’s operational management, which severs ownership from control at the level where control would otherwise be exercised. The OCC also set a $20 million minimum capital requirement and told the bank to appoint a qualified internal audit manager before opening.
The board pairs founders with outside credibility. Zach Witkoff, co-founder and CEO of World Liberty Financial, chairs it. Scott Alper, president and CIO of Witkoff Group, and Robert Witkoff, formerly co-CIO of The Chubb Corporation, sit alongside two independents: Jeffrey Weiner, former chairman and CEO of accounting firm Marcum LLP, and Erin Baskett, a member of the FINRA Board of Governors.
OCC career staff have defended the process, saying the decision went through regular delegated authority and involved extensive consultation with government ethics officials. That defence has not landed with everyone.
The Chinese AI connection nobody in Washington expected
A Reuters review found that 43 of the roughly 90 AI models offered through Hong Kong-based WorldClaw were built by Chinese companies including Alibaba, Baidu and Z.ai, alongside models from OpenAI and Anthropic. WorldClaw accepts USD1 as payment. Ryan Fang, World Liberty’s Head of Growth, has served as an external adviser to WorldClaw on USD1 adoption and partnerships, a role the platform describes as strictly advisory. Strip away the branding and the result is a bank 38% owned by the president’s family running settlement for a platform that resells models from firms the Pentagon lists as military-aligned and Commerce has placed on its Entity List.
The optics problem is broader than one adviser. Americans for Financial Reform has criticized the OCC directly. Graham Steele, who served as assistant secretary for financial institutions at the Treasury Department, told Banking Dive the chartering is rife with conflicts of interest and would count as a major scandal under any other administration. Separately, Tron founder Justin Sun is suing World Liberty Financial in a California court, alleging the company embedded freeze and burn controls in its smart contracts and used them to lock roughly 4 billion tokens bought with a $45 million investment. On August 20 a federal judge rejected World Liberty’s attempt to move Sun’s individual claims into confidential arbitration, keeping them in open court. World Liberty rejects the claim, but the allegation goes to whether USD1’s contract-level controls are as neutral as an issuer under federal supervision would need them to be.
The charter has become an argument against passing crypto legislation
Senator Elizabeth Warren and several Senate Democrats have introduced a bill barring sitting presidents and vice presidents from owning or controlling banks, framing the OCC appointee structure as an unprecedented conflict. The more consequential effect is legislative gravity. The Clarity Act was already stalling before the charter landed. Polymarket’s contract on the bill becoming law this year traded above 80% in February, fell to the high thirties when Senate leadership passed on a floor vote before the July recess, and sat near 25% by the third week of August. What the charter changed is the argument. World Liberty got federal trust supervision without the statute, which undercuts the industry’s case that firms have no path forward until Congress acts.
What comes next is procedural but decisive. The pre-opening examination will test whether WLTC’s reserve controls, custody segregation and governance separations function as described on paper, and the OCC can withhold final approval if they do not. Watch also whether Circle responds on fees, because a fee-free redemption promise from a federally chartered competitor changes the economics of holding USDC through volatile weeks rather than calm ones.