Stripe's Bridge applies for National Bank Trust Charter to expand stablecoin business. The license, if granted, would help the stablecoin infrastructure firm to "tokenize trillions of dollars," co-founder Zach Abrams said on Wednesday.

Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company acquired by Stripe in early 2025, has applied to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a national bank trust charter in order to bring its stablecoin issuance, custody, and reserve management activities under a single federal regime. Unlike a full-service bank charter, the trust charter would not allow Bridge to take insured deposits or make loans, but it would permit the firm to operate as a federally supervised trust bank focused on digital asset and stablecoin services. The application is part of a broader regulatory shift following passage of the GENIUS Act, a recently enacted U.S. law that establishes a federal framework and guardrails for dollar-denominated stablecoins. Since the Senate approved the act in June, crypto firms including Circle, Paxos, Ripple, and Coinbase have also sought similar OCC trust charters, positioning themselves to issue and manage stablecoins under direct federal oversight rather than relying on a patchwork of state money-transmitter licenses. Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams described the national trust charter as key regulatory infrastructure that could enable the firm to “tokenize trillions of dollars,” signalling an ambition to support large-scale enterprise and financial-institution use of stablecoins within the U.S. banking perimeter. The move has drawn scrutiny from traditional banking trade groups, which in a July letter urged the OCC to delay decisions on crypto-related trust charter applications, reflecting ongoing debate over how far nontraditional firms should be allowed into the national banking system. The OCC had not granted any new national trust charters earlier in the year, underscoring the significance of Bridge’s application as a test case for how regulators will implement the GENIUS Act and integrate stablecoin infrastructure providers into federal bank supervision.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• Stripe's Bridge applies for national trust charter - Banking Dive (bankingdive.com)
• Stripe's Bridge wins OCC conditional approval - Payments Dive (paymentsdive.com)
• Bridge — Stripe's $1.1B stablecoin acquisition (x.com)
• Bridge receives OCC conditional approval (bridge.xyz)
• [PDF] Re: Bridge National Trust Bank, NA, Charter Application (2025 ... (bpi.com)

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