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The regulatory text just caught up with the practice.
An amendment to 12 CFR 5.20, published in the Federal Register on March 2, takes effect today. It replaces the term "fiduciary activities" in the OCC's chartering regulation with the phrase "operations of a trust company and activities related thereto," aligning the regulatory language with the statutory authority in 12 U.S.C. 27(a).
The OCC was explicit in its rulemaking: it had never interpreted "fiduciary activities" to limit national trust banks to fiduciary work only. Non-fiduciary custody accounts — the kind that crypto firms building on this charter structure specifically need — were always authorised. The ambiguity was in the text, not in the practice. Today, the text is unambiguous.
That distinction matters now more than it would have at any prior point. As FinTech Weekly reported in March, eleven companies filed for or received conditional OCC national trust bank charter approvals in an eighty-three day window. Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Paxos, Fidelity Digital Assets, Bridge, Crypto.com, Protego, Morgan Stanley, Payoneer, and Zerohash each filed or received conditional approvals before March 5. Coinbase and World Liberty Financial have applications pending.
Every one of those companies is building a federal banking presence against this regulatory text. As of today, the word on which the legal architecture rests has changed. The OCC's chartering regulation now says exactly what the companies filing under it need it to say.
The practical stakes are not abstract. The Conference of State Banking Supervisors has raised concerns about what it has called the legal structure of these charters.
Traditional banks continue to oppose expanded Federal Reserve payment rail access for newly chartered entities. Those fights are ongoing. What is not ongoing, as of today, is the textual ambiguity that could have provided a foothold for a future legal challenge to what national trust banks are authorised to do.
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