On October 2, 2026, an association of community banks brought suit against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (the “OCC”), as well as Comptroller Jonathan V. Gould, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The suit challenges a final rule issued by the OCC in March of 2026, wherein the OCC amended its regulations to permit the chartering of entities as “national trust banks” even where those entities neither act as fiduciaries nor take deposits, pay checks or lend money.
The suit comes on the heels of moves by the OCC in 2026 to charter several cryptocurrency companies as “national trust banks”, including at least one cryptocurrency platform chartered under the new rule which currently acts as an exchange for facilitating consumer cryptocurrency transactions. In their suit, the association of community banks asserts that the OCC lacks the statutory authority to issue national trust bank charters to entities that neither act as a fiduciary, nor perform banking functions such as taking deposits, including the cryptocurrency exchange. The association alleges that the OCC exceeded its authority in issuing its March 2026 rule, which amended the regulatory standard for national trust bank chartering from requiring that an entity either engage in “fiduciary activities” or do one of three “core banking functions” (take deposits, pay checks, or lend money), to requiring that it either engage in “operations of a trust company and activities related thereto” or perform any of those three functions. The association of community banks contends that cryptocurrency companies chartered as national trust banks under this rule will gain an unfair advantage against the community banks, as the cryptocurrency companies are not federally insured banks and therefore not subject to the same regulations as the community banks.
This case will be one to follow closely as it progresses. As more and more Americans have looked to cryptocurrencies in recent years as a means for storing a greater share of their assets, the banking regulatory regime has been slow to address questions raised by the emergence of cryptocurrency-based entities in some areas, and taken a more permissive approach in others. This case represents an effort by industry players to push back on this trend and, should it succeed, could encourage future efforts by other members of the banking industry to address the growing competition posed by cryptocurrency-based entities.