The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Comptroller Jonathan Gould on Friday, asking a federal judge in Washington to throw out the rule the agency has used to grant national trust charters to crypto firms. The trade group, whose members typically hold less than $10 billion in assets, says those charters let digital-asset companies pick up the credibility of a federal bank without the deposit insurance, capital standards, or community-lending duties that apply to the banks it represents. Its complaint counts 21 trust banks approved or conditionally approved under the Trump administration, at least 13 of them crypto companies, including a trust company tied to President Donald Trump’s family and a conditional charter for crypto exchange giant Coinbase.
What the OCC Changed
The case brought by the ICBA is an Administrative Procedure Act challenge to two agency actions and one specific charter approval. Interpretive Letter 1176, issued during the last days of the first Trump administration, told the industry that the OCC could charter a firm as a national bank if it engaged in “the operations of a trust company and activities related thereto,” even if it did not take deposits. A final rule implementing that reading was eventually published on March 2nd.
The ICBA says that the 1978 National Bank Act amendment Gould’s agency is leaning on did not create a path for non-fiduciary crypto companies to gain bank charters. According to the ICBA’s complaint, the OCC had never tried to charter a national bank that neither took deposits nor acted as a fiduciary until the Trump administration went looking for a way to bring cryptocurrency into the national system.
On December 12th, the OCC conditionally approved national trust charters for Ripple National Trust Bank and First National Digital Currency Bank, and conversions for BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos. Coinbase said in April that it had received conditional approval for Coinbase National Trust Company, and wrote in a company blog post that the charter would not make it a commercial bank or let it take retail deposits. In August, the same agency conditionally approved World Liberty Trust Company, the vehicle Trump-affiliated World Liberty Financial wants to use to issue and custody its USD1 stablecoin, which has been tied to corruption allegations around the pardon of Binance’s former chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, who previously pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations.
The Protego Test Case
The filing asks the court to declare the March rule and Interpretive Letter 1176 unlawful, set both aside, and bar the OCC from using either to grant or conditionally approve another charter. It also asks the judge to vacate one approval in particular, the conditional charter given to Protego Holdings in February. Protego, which applied in May 2025, had received an earlier conditional approval in 2021 that expired in 2023, the same year it laid off more than half its workforce.
The ICBA says the firm plans to run custody, trading, crypto lending, and token-issuance platforms in a non-fiduciary capacity, with fiduciary work limited to ancillary services, and that commenters warned the OCC about flawed risk controls and a governance structure short on independent oversight. The group also points to vendor lawsuits and judgments over unpaid bills. A national trust charter, the complaint says, would let Protego operate nationwide, preempt a range of state consumer-protection laws, and skip FDIC insurance, Community Reinvestment Act obligations, Basel-style capital and liquidity rules, and the separation of banking and commerce that covers insured banks. The OCC, ICBA adds, has not managed an uninsured-bank receivership in nearly 100 years.
ICBA President and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey put the same argument in plainer terms on the day the suit was filed. “Congress did not create the national trust charter as a side door into the banking system for crypto firms seeking the credibility of a federal bank charter without the Community Reinvestment Act obligations, consolidated supervision, capital and liquidity standards, and FDIC insurance that apply to insured depository institutions,” she said. “American consumers reasonably expect a federally chartered bank to carry federal protections. Digital assets held at a crypto firm operating under a national trust charter do not carry those important safeguards.”
Gould has described the same chartering push as a policy that enables greater competition in the market. When announcing that December batch of charters, the comptroller said, “New entrants into the federal banking sector are good for consumers, the banking industry and the economy.” In August he went further, saying that “entities that engage in legally permissible activities, including those involving digital assets and other novel technologies, should have a path to becoming a national bank.” An OCC spokesperson declined to comment to Reuters on the lawsuit.
The Trump-Connected Bank Charter and Crypto Projects
World Liberty is the approval that sits closest to the president. The OCC’s August letter gave World Liberty Trust Company conditional preliminary approval to issue USD1 and hold the dollars backing it. BitGo currently handles both. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, had already told Gould to reject the application. “If you follow the law, you will reject the president’s application,” she said at a February hearing. The OCC’s approval letter said Gould and staff had acted consistently with their statutory duties and ethical obligations, and that nonpolitical examiners would supervise the bank. The charter is still conditional, and it is not a license to take insured deposits.
The trust charter is far from the only federal question hanging over the family’s crypto business. Duke University lecturing fellow Lee Reiners, a former bank examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has argued that World Liberty’s WLFI token is an unregistered security under the Howey test and that the Securities and Exchange Commission has not treated it that way. He also argued that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, better known as the CLARITY Act, would have written non-security status into law by treating tokens like WLFI as network tokens.
However, last month, the Senate voted 49-50 against cloture on the motion to proceed, short of the 60 votes needed to bring the CLARITY Act to the floor. Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland accused Republican leadership of “playing a game” by forcing the vote while refusing to hold Trump accountable for crypto “corruption.” Democrats said a fight over ethics language helped stall the bill.
In addition to the aforementioned pardon for the Binance CEO, an investment firm tied to United Arab Emirates National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan agreed to a $500 million deal tied to a 49% stake in World Liberty days before the January 2025 inauguration, a contract Eric Trump reportedly signed. Separately, House Financial Services Democrats Maxine Waters, Sean Casten, and Brad Sherman wrote to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins in January of this year about dismissed crypto cases and “the unmistakable inference of a pay-to-play scheme.”
A Reuters tally from June put the Trump family’s crypto profit at $2.3 billion or more since Trump retook the presidency, against about $2.3 billion in losses for people who bought Trump-related tokens.
The CLARITY Act’s ethics-related failure has not stopped the promoter of Trump’s own memecoin, Fight Fight Fight, which is now advertising a November 22nd gala at Trump National Golf Club outside Washington for the top 185 holders a little more than two weeks after the midterms, with the president listed as the featured speaker. Democratic lawmakers have said a midterm win could put these kinds of events under a microscope.
A May poll of 1,000 registered voters found that 62% do not trust the Trump administration to handle crypto regulation, but Democratic lawmakers have not yet opened an investigation. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said Trump is “helping put corruption on the ballot,” and added, “Clearly the president is more focused on pathetically pumping the price of his worthless memecoin than Americans’ cost-of-living crisis.”
