Coinbase has received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to charter Coinbase National Trust Company (CNTC), federalizing the institutional custody business currently housed in its New York state chartered trust company. Greg Tusar, co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, confirmed the milestone.
Tusar emphasized that Coinbase is not becoming a commercial bank, will not take retail deposits and will not engage in fractional reserve banking. The charter brings federal regulatory uniformity to a custody business that previously operated solely under state oversight from New York Department of Financial Services.
The conditional approval comes roughly six months after Coinbase filed its application, slightly longer than the approximately five months the OCC took to process earlier approvals for Circle, Ripple and others in the December 2025 batch. The additional time likely reflects the scale and complexity of the review. Where Circle’s application centered on a stablecoin reserve structure backed by cash and Treasuries, Coinbase presented $376 billion in crypto assets under custody at the 2025 year end, representing nearly 13% of total crypto market capitalization.
Custodying bearer instruments on public blockchains without freeze or recall mechanisms poses a distinct risk profile that the OCC would have needed to evaluate in depth, particularly given the systemic concentration involved. To put this in context, while Binance has more than five times the spot trading volumes, Binance’s assets on platform were less than half ($162.8 billion) on the same date, demonstrating Coinbase’s significant footprint in institutional custody.
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