Bridge wins initial OCC approval for national trust bank charter

Bridge has received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to organize a nationally chartered trust bank, giving the company a federally supervised pathway to issue and custody stablecoins. The announcement on Feb. 17, 2026, positions Bridge — now owned by Stripe — to operate under bank supervision while agencies work toward implementing rules tied to the GENIUS Act. Bridge already supports on-chain issuance for products such as Phantom’s CASH and MetaMask’s mUSD through Stripe’s Open Issuance stack, and the charter would centralize its reserve management, custody practices and issuer controls under a trust-bank framework.

The approval arrives as federal agencies move in parallel to define guardrails for dollar-pegged tokens. The CFTC has updated guidance to explicitly recognize national trust banks as eligible stablecoin issuers under its payment-stablecoin framework, and the FDIC has proposed supervisory approaches for banks running token programs through regulated subsidiaries. Those developments reduce legal ambiguity for bank-affiliated issuers but also elevate supervisory expectations around reserve composition, liquidity and operational controls.

At the same time, the American Bankers Association has urged the OCC to pause review of certain trust-charter applications, warning that conditional approvals for limited-purpose entities raise unresolved questions about capital, custody segregation and how charters intersect with SEC and CFTC jurisdiction. The OCC’s conditional sign-off for Bridge echoes a prior round of conditional letters last year to other operators — a trend that regulators appear to be using to pilot supervisory models while interagency rulemaking and congressional deliberations continue.

Operationally, organizing as a national trust will subject Bridge to ongoing bank supervision, reporting obligations and prudential standards required under federal banking law. For enterprise customers and payment platforms, a trust charter should lower perceived custody and settlement risk and simplify integration to regulated digital-dollar rails. But the broader regulatory push also concentrates demand for short-term, high-quality assets to back tokens and increases scrutiny on redemption mechanics, reserve audits and recovery planning.

Market consequences are mixed: the charter strengthens Stripe’s regulated payments strategy and likely accelerates institutional adoption of tokenized dollars, while regulatory friction and trade‑group opposition could slow some launches or impose additional milestones on conditional approvals. The emergence of other newly chartered banks — including recent de novo national-bank approvals focused on tech and crypto clients — highlights divergent paths firms are using to enter tokenized payments, and underscores the practical differences between national bank and national trust structures for custody and deposit-taking activities.