Coinbase's national trust bank charter took effect on Friday, according to the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), marking a regulatory milestone for one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States.

The approval supports the company's plan to expand its institutional crypto custody business under the federal charter, and Coinbase is also exploring digital asset payment products.

According to the OCC's preliminary approval letter, the charter allows Coinbase National Trust Company to hold digital assets on behalf of clients as a fiduciary — a status that carries a legal obligation to act in clients' interests. National trust charters permit firms to conduct fiduciary activities, including asset custody, under federal rather than state supervision, meaning custody operations at the new entity fall under the OCC's oversight rather than that of individual state banking regulators.

Coinbase applied for the charter in October 2025 and received preliminary approval in April 2026, according to the OCC's filing record.

Under the charter, Coinbase plans to offer institutional clients segregated custody accounts, with access to staking, financing and trading through other Coinbase entities, according to its charter application. Segregated accounts are designed to keep individual clients' assets separate from one another and from the company's own holdings — a structure intended to insulate client property from the firm's balance sheet, a key consideration for institutions evaluating custody providers.

The application also outlined plans to explore digital asset payment products and custody services that would allow clients to interact with select smart contracts.

The OCC has reviewed a series of applications from digital asset firms seeking federal trust charters in recent years, a group spanning crypto-native companies and traditional finance names. Other crypto companies that have received OCC national trust bank charters include Ripple, Circle, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos. Crypto.com and Bridge, a payments firm owned by Stripe, received conditional approval, while Kraken and EDX Markets are still pursuing charters. How quickly the conditional approvals move to final charters, and how the remaining applications are resolved, will offer a measure of the pace of federal charter issuance for the digital asset industry — while Coinbase's rollout of the segregated custody accounts and payment products described in its application will show how the exchange puts its new federal charter to use.

Source: Cointelegraph