Senator Elizabeth Warren has demanded that the OCC produce records by June 1 explaining its approval of national trust charters for nine crypto firms including Coinbase, Ripple, Paxos, Circle, BitGo, Fidelity, Crypto.com, Protego, and Stripe's Bridge subsidiary.
Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a six-page letter to OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould on May 18 accusing his agency of illegally granting national trust charters to nine crypto firms. The list reads like a roll-call of the industry's largest US-based custodians: Ripple, Paxos, Coinbase, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, Circle's First National Digital Currency Bank, Crypto.com's Foris DAX, Protego's National Digital Trust Company, and Stripe's Bridge National Trust Bank. Warren has asked for all underlying records — applications, internal memos, and supervisory correspondence — by June 1.
Her core argument is that the OCC has waved through firms whose published business plans describe activities trust banks are not legally permitted to perform. The letter quotes from the firms' own filings, which reference "non-fiduciary custodial activities, facilitating payments and lending activities, and conducting stablecoin activities closely related to deposit-taking." A traditional trust bank holds assets in custody as a fiduciary; it does not lend, it does not accept deposits, and it does not provide payment rails. Warren's position is that the OCC has approved entities that intend to do all three while remaining outside the deposit insurance and capital regimes that govern full-service national banks.
The framing — "effectively crypto banks that want to evade the fundamental safeguards and obligations that come with being a bank" — is hers. The legal substance is harder to dismiss than the partisan packaging suggests. National trust banks operate under a different section of the National Bank Act and face dramatically lighter capital and liquidity requirements than insured depositories. If a Ripple or a Coinbase can issue a stablecoin and facilitate payments under that lighter charter, every other payments business in the country has a regulatory arbitrage argument to make. The OCC will have to either explain why these activities qualify as fiduciary or walk the approvals back.
This isn't the first time the OCC's posture on crypto has drawn fire from Warren. In April, the agency granted Anchorage Digital expanded powers over cryptocurrency custody. Stripe's Bridge subsidiary filed for its own charter shortly after. Each approval has expanded what a crypto firm can do without becoming a deposit-taking bank. Warren's letter argues, with citations, that the pattern looks less like measured regulatory accommodation and more like a sequence of decisions the agency cannot defend on the merits.
The political timing is loaded. Warren is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, which has spent the last three weeks marking up the CLARITY Act — the omnibus crypto market structure bill that would, among other things, formalise the regulatory treatment of stablecoins. Warren filed 40 amendments to the CLARITY Act draft on May 11. A letter accusing the OCC of pre-empting Congress by handing out de facto bank charters lands at exactly the moment her amendments would otherwise be losing momentum to industry-friendly redrafts.
The companies named have an obvious response, which is that the OCC's lawyers reviewed and approved each application, that trust charter activities have been expanded for a decade, and that they are operating within the letter of federal banking law. Coinbase's national trust company, for example, only handles institutional custody — it does not take retail deposits. Ripple has positioned its trust bank as a stablecoin issuer for RLUSD. Paxos has held a New York trust charter for years and the OCC version is a federal-level expansion of an existing model.
The thinner ground is the stablecoin activity. A trust company that issues a stablecoin is, in functional terms, accepting customer funds in exchange for a tokenised liability redeemable on demand. Whether that fits within fiduciary custody is the question Warren is forcing the OCC to answer in writing. If the agency cannot articulate a clean legal theory, the approvals are vulnerable to challenge — either in court, through a private suit, or through congressional pressure at the OCC's next budget review.
Comptroller Gould's office has not yet responded publicly. The OCC has thirteen days to either produce the requested records or invoke an exemption. A flat refusal would invite a subpoena from the Banking Committee, which Republican chair Tim Scott has so far avoided issuing on any crypto matter. Whether he protects the agency or the firms it has chartered is now a live question.
Warren listed the firms by name; she did not list World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-linked crypto venture that has its own pending charter application before the OCC. The omission is conspicuous. Sources familiar with her thinking say a separate letter on that application is being drafted and will likely follow the same June 1 timeline. The first letter is the legal challenge to the framework; the second, when it arrives, will be the political one.
The OCC has not paused processing of new applications in light of the letter. Fidelity Digital Asset Services' charter became operational this week, and three more applications are listed as pending on the agency's public docket.
