Ripple has secured final approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national trust bank dedicated to digital assets, a move that gives the company a federally regulated vehicle to manage the reserves backing its RLUSD stablecoin and to offer custody services to institutional clients.
The new entity, Ripple National Trust Bank (RNTB), will be headquartered in New York. Under the terms of its charter, RNTB will be able to hold the reserves underpinning RLUSD and provide digital asset custody to corporate clients. It will not, however, be authorised to take public deposits or issue loans, limiting it to the narrower set of powers typical of a trust bank rather than a full commercial bank.
The approval process began in December 2025. On 12 December that year, the OCC issued conditional approvals to four companies seeking national trust charters for digital asset activities: Ripple, Circle, Paxos and BitGo. Ripple's conditional approval has now been converted into final approval. The current status of the applications filed by Circle, Paxos and BitGo has not been confirmed.
Circle is the issuer of USDC, one of the largest dollar-pegged stablecoins by market value, and would stand alongside Ripple as a beneficiary of the OCC's trust bank framework should its own application progress to final approval.
What changes for RLUSD
RLUSD is currently issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-chartered entity regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). The OCC's final approval for RNTB creates a federally chartered alternative structure that Ripple can use to manage the stablecoin's reserves, operating under the supervision of a national banking regulator rather than, or in addition to, the state-level NYDFS framework.
The charter's restrictions mean RNTB will function strictly as a trust institution: safeguarding reserves and custodying assets, without the deposit-taking or lending functions associated with conventional banks. For institutional clients, the arrangement offers a federally regulated custody option for digital assets alongside Ripple's existing stablecoin operations.
