No. Ramp has only filed an application with the OCC. A national trust bank charter requires formal OCC approval, which historically takes 12 to 24 months and can come with conditions.

Will Ramp hold customer deposits?

No. A national trust bank is a non-depository institution. It cannot take FDIC-insured deposits. It can hold assets in fiduciary capacity, including digital assets, for clients.

How does this compare to Anchorage Digital Bank?

Anchorage received the first OCC conditional approval for a crypto-native national trust bank in January 2021. Ramp's application targets the same charter type but comes from a corporate payments background rather than a crypto-native custodian.

Ramp Files for US National Trust Bank Charter to Custody Digital Assets

Market impact

There's no listed Ramp token and no direct spot-market tape to read off this. The relevant read-across is sentiment, not price. Custody incumbents like Coinbase and BitGo already compete on fee compression and institutional service, and a federally chartered Ramp Trust widens that field.

Stablecoin issuers watching the OCC posture, including Circle and Paxos, get another data point on whether Washington's quiet shift toward federal charters is accelerating. The headline looks like a win for crypto's regulated-rails narrative. The approval timeline doesn't care about narrative.

OCC trust charter decisions have historically taken 12 to 24 months, and conditional approvals have come with operational restrictions that can meaningfully narrow the business case before launch.

Ramp, the corporate payments platform, applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Oct. 19 for a US national trust bank charter that would let it custody digital assets and run fiduciary investment management under federal supervision, the company said in a statement Monday. The move puts Ramp in a growing queue of crypto-adjacent firms seeking the OCC's uniform federal charter instead of state-by-state trust licenses. If approved, Ramp Trust would operate as a non-depository national trust bank.

By Elena Stojanović· AI-assisted· Regulation correspondent

What happened

Ramp filed its application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Oct. 19, per the company's own announcement cited by Crypto. News.

The vehicle, Ramp Trust, would be chartered as a national trust bank, a non-depository structure that cannot take insured deposits but can hold assets in fiduciary capacity. Ramp said the entity would offer digital asset custody and fiduciary investment management services to institutional clients. Ramp is best known as a corporate card and spend-management platform used by thousands of US businesses.

The trust charter would be a sharp pivot into regulated crypto infrastructure, not a bolt-on feature. The OCC confirms receipt of trust charter applications but does not publish filings until the agency decides to open a public comment window.

Why it matters

A national trust bank charter is the cleanest regulatory wrapper a US crypto custodian can get. It preempts the state-by-state money transmitter and trust license grind that Coinbase Custody, Gemini, and BitGo have lived with for years. Anchorage Digital Bank got the first OCC conditional approval in January 2021.

Paxos pulled its application in 2022. Protego and Circle have been in various stages of the queue. The pipeline matters because it signals which firms the OCC sees as viable fiduciaries for digital assets, and under what guardrails.

Ramp's filing arrives at a moment when stablecoin issuers and payments firms are converging on the same regulatory perimeter. If Ramp wins the charter, it gets federal legitimacy for custody and fiduciary services in one stroke. If it stalls, that tells you where the OCC is drawing lines in late 2026.

Market impact

Ramp Files for US National Trust Bank Charter to Custody Digital Assets

What happened

Why it matters

Market impact

What to watch

Disclaimer

Key takeaways

Frequently asked

Sources