From Decrypt · By Decrypt Agent
In brief
The OCC has granted Ripple final approval to open Ripple National Trust Bank, 10 months after conditionally approving the charter in December 2025.
The bank will manage the reserves backing Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin, act as collateral trustee for holders, and offer fiduciary digital asset custody.
The approval comes as community banks challenge the OCC's crypto charters in court, after Sen. Elizabeth Warren called them illegal.
Ripple has received final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Ripple National Trust Bank, a federally supervised national trust bank, the company said on Monday.
The approval completes a process that began when the OCC conditionally approved Ripple's application in December 2025, alongside those of Circle, Paxos, Fidelity Digital Assets and BitGo.
Once open, the bank will manage the segregated reserves backing the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin, act as collateral trustee of those reserves for the benefit of RLUSD holders, and provide fiduciary digital asset custody services to enterprises. RLUSD will still be issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company, Ripple's limited purpose trust company regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services, so the stablecoin will now sit under both state and federal supervision.
"For years, we've said crypto and banks work better together. Final approval for Ripple National Trust Bank is what that looks like in practice," Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in the release. In a tweet, he added: "The revolution isn't happening outside the system. It's happening from within it."
Big news heading into @RippleSwell: the @USOCC has granted final approval for Ripple National Trust Bank.
This gives Ripple a federally supervised platform to support $RLUSD and provide digital asset custody to enterprises.
We’ve always said crypto and banks work better…
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) October 26, 2026
Launched in December 2024, RLUSD has a market capitalization of about $2.6 billion, according to CoinGecko. Ripple says the stablecoin is used across its payments network and as collateral within its Ripple Prime brokerage. BNY is the stablecoin's primary reserve custodian.
XRP, the cryptocurrency closely associated with Ripple, rose 0.5% over the past 24 hours to $1.29, according to CoinGecko, one of only two top-10 coins by market cap to gain on the day alongside Zcash.
Myriad: Where does ETH go next? Click to make your prediction.
Crypto's bank charter fight
The national trust charters the OCC has handed to crypto firms remain contested. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has argued, in a letter to Comptroller Jonathan Gould, that the approvals for firms including Coinbase and Ripple violated the National Bank Act. "These companies are effectively crypto banks that want to evade the fundamental safeguards and obligations that come with being a bank," she wrote.