Bankers Urge OCC to Pause Crypto Trust Charters Until GENIUS Rules Clear
The American Bankers Association (ABA) has asked the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to delay approvals of national trust bank charters for crypto and stablecoin firms until the regulatory framework under the GENIUS Act is clarified. In comment letters on the OCC’s proposed national trust charter rulemaking, the ABA warned that digital-asset applicants face overlapping, unsettled oversight from federal and state regulators and that conditional charters could grant firms access to Federal Reserve services and national licensing before their full regulatory obligations are defined. The ABA flagged unresolved safety-and-soundness, operational and resolution risks for uninsured, limited-purpose digital-asset trust banks, citing customer-asset segregation, conflicts of interest, cybersecurity and potential circumvention of SEC/CFTC oversight. It requested greater transparency on capital, operational and resilience requirements in conditional approvals and urged the OCC to bar non-bank trust firms from using “bank” in their names to avoid consumer confusion. The plea follows recent OCC conditional approvals for several crypto firms (including BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Ripple, Paxos and others). For traders: the move could delay crypto firms’ access to Fed rails and regulated settlement, prolong regulatory uncertainty around stablecoins and custody, and increase compliance scrutiny — factors that can affect liquidity, institutional flows and market structure decisions.
Neutral
This development is primarily regulatory and procedural rather than directly market-moving for any single cryptocurrency’s price. Requests from the ABA to pause or slow OCC approvals increase regulatory uncertainty, which can weigh on institutional adoption and the timeline for crypto firms to access Fed rails and regulated settlement. In the short term this may reduce bullish momentum tied to institutional on-ramps and delay product rollouts (e.g., custody offerings, stablecoin settlement), potentially hurting liquidity or demand for tokens closely tied to those firms. However, the letter does not impose new restrictions itself and instead asks the OCC to wait for clearer rules (GENIUS Act); final outcomes could either tighten or clarify the path forward. Over the medium-to-long term, clearer regulation could be constructive if it yields robust, predictable rules — but the immediate effect is increased policy uncertainty, which is typically neutral-to-slightly negative for market sentiment. Given the news addresses charter approvals across multiple firms rather than a single token, classify the impact as neutral on any one cryptocurrency’s price.