Block's bank charter skips deposits, loans

Jack Dorsey's Block filed an application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Tuesday to create Builders Bank & Trust, an uninsured national trust bank built to custody Bitcoin and stablecoins.

The bank would take no deposits and make no loans. It exists to hold digital assets under a single federal charter instead of a patchwork of state licenses.

The filing details

Block's application isn't the first of its kind, and that's the point. The company is following a path several rivals have already walked toward the same regulator.

• Builders Bank would be an uninsured national trust bank supervised solely by the OCC, per Cointelegraph.
• Ripple holds conditional approval for a comparable national trust charter.
• Circle and BitGo have already received final OCC approval for theirs.
• Kraken parent Payward and infrastructure firm Zerohash have applications pending alongside Block's.
• Lee Woolley, Block's digital asset strategy lead, is named as the proposed bank's president and CEO.

Block already runs Square Financial Services, an industrial bank. Builders Bank would sit next to it, not replace it, handling custody instead of commercial banking.

What the charter actually buys

The obvious read treats this as Block chasing legitimacy, another crypto-adjacent firm wanting a federal seal before regulators tighten the screws. That's true but it undersells what's changing.

The real shift is structural. A national trust charter collapses 50 state money-transmitter regimes into one OCC relationship, and every company on that approval list is racing for the same shortcut.

No deposits, no loans, no FDIC insurance. The bank exists purely to hold assets under fiduciary duty and one supervisor's rulebook, stripped of every feature that makes a bank risky to depositors.

That narrowness is the strategy. Circle and BitGo already proved the OCC will grant this specific, limited charter to non-bank custodians, and Ripple's conditional nod confirms the pipeline works.

Block isn't testing new ground. It's joining a queue that's already validated, which means the real signal isn't Block's filing, it's how fast the queue behind it keeps growing.

Five applicants in one charter category, all from firms with existing crypto custody books, tells you the OCC has become the default gatekeeper for institutional-grade digital asset storage.

That consolidates power in one regulator's hands. It also means the next fight isn't about legitimacy, it's about how many of these five actually clear the bar and what conditions come attached.

Signals worth tracking

Approval timing and conditions will separate the companies that treat this as a formality from those still building trust with examiners.

• Whether the OCC approves Builders Bank outright or attaches conditions, as it did with Ripple's charter.
• Whether Payward or Zerohash gets approved first, testing if exchange-adjacent or infrastructure firms move faster than payments companies.
• Any OCC statement on how many trust charter applications are pending industry-wide, which would size the queue Block just joined.