The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) has sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in federal court, in a direct challenge to the national trust bank charters the regulator has been granting to digital asset firms. The suit was filed on Friday, October 2, according to COINOTAG, which characterized the case as a test of Bitcoin (BTC)'s access to U.S. banking services.

The ICBA is the leading U.S. trade association representing community banks and has been an active participant in Washington debates over how fintech and crypto firms should be chartered and supervised. With the lawsuit, the group is carrying that advocacy from the policy arena into the courts.

The OCC, an independent bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, charters, regulates, and supervises national banks and federal savings associations. Alongside full-service national bank charters, the agency issues national trust bank charters — a narrower form of federal charter centered on fiduciary, custody, and trust activities. Trust charters do not generally carry deposit-taking authority, a distinction that underlies the competitive concerns community banks have long voiced.

Digital asset companies have pursued these charters in recent years as a way to bring custody and related services under federal oversight. The OCC issued its first national trust charter to a crypto-native firm in January 2021, when Anchorage received approval. For firms building Bitcoin custody and related offerings, a single federal charter has served as an alternative to assembling licenses state by state.

OCC special purpose charters have drawn litigation before. In 2019, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors and the New York State Department of Financial Services filed separate lawsuits against the agency over its fintech charters, making the limits of the OCC's chartering authority a recurring question for the federal courts.

Community banking groups have historically argued that federal charters extended to fintech and crypto companies create uneven competitive conditions relative to state-chartered, deposit-taking institutions. The specific legal arguments raised in the ICBA's complaint were not detailed in the initial report. Once the complaint and the OCC's response are on the docket, the legal questions at issue — and the scope of the challenge to the trust charter pathway — will come into view.

This content was first published on COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/icba-sues-occ-crypto-trust-charters-btc