Ripple applied to form a national trust bank for its stablecoin business

Ripple applied on July 2, 2025 to establish Ripple National Trust Bank, placing its stablecoin and digital-asset infrastructure business before the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for federal charter review. The OCC’s application system records July 2 as the receipt date under control number 2025-Charter-342347.

The filing mattered because Ripple was seeking a position inside the federal banking perimeter rather than relying exclusively on state-level supervision and commercial-bank intermediaries. It was also part of a broader movement by stablecoin issuers toward federal oversight: Circle had submitted its own national trust bank application on June 30, 2025.

What Ripple proposed

The application identified the proposed institution as Ripple National Trust Bank, headquartered in New York and wholly owned by Ripple Labs. It requested national-bank trust powers rather than authority to operate as a conventional deposit-taking commercial bank.

According to the filing’s public volume, the proposed bank would complement Ripple’s stablecoin and payments businesses. Its planned functions included managing reserves associated with Ripple USD, or RLUSD, and providing related fiduciary services. RLUSD was issued through Standard Custody & Trust Company, Ripple’s New York limited-purpose trust subsidiary, and had become available on exchanges beginning December 17, 2024.

A charter application was only the start of an OCC review. It did not authorize Ripple National Trust Bank to open, confer federal deposit insurance, or convert RLUSD into an insured bank deposit. The OCC still had to assess the organizers, business plan, capital, governance, compliance systems and permissible activities before deciding whether to grant preliminary approval.

Why the structure mattered

Federal trust-bank supervision could give Ripple a single national regulator for approved reserve-management, custody and fiduciary functions. That offered a potential alternative to assembling the same institutional structure through multiple state regimes and third-party banking relationships.

The proposed institution nevertheless had a limited purpose. Its trust charter request did not amount to permission to offer ordinary checking accounts, make general commercial loans or conduct every activity available to a full-service national bank. It also did not establish that the OCC endorsed RLUSD, XRP or any other digital asset as an investment.

Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse separately said on July 2 that Standard Custody was seeking a Federal Reserve master account. Such an account could provide direct access to Federal Reserve payment services and potentially permit reserves to be held at a Federal Reserve Bank. That was a company-attributed claim about a separate process, however—not an approval established by the OCC charter filing or an independently confirmed Federal Reserve decision.

The policy setting on July 2

The application arrived while Congress was debating a federal framework for payment stablecoins. The Senate had passed the GENIUS Act on June 17, 2025 by a 68–30 vote, but the measure had not passed the House or become law by July 2. Ripple’s filing therefore anticipated a possible federal framework rather than operating under an enacted version of it.

This chronology limits the event-day conclusion. Ripple had asked to bring specified stablecoin-reserve and fiduciary activities under OCC supervision; it had not obtained permission to begin those activities as a national trust bank. Circle’s application two days earlier showed that the strategy was not unique to Ripple and suggested that stablecoin issuers increasingly viewed bank charters as infrastructure for institutional credibility and regulatory consolidation.

What the record did not prove

No authoritative event-window analysis establishes that the application caused a particular movement in XRP, RLUSD or the wider cryptocurrency market. Contemporaneous outlets reported a modest XRP response, but their snapshots did not consistently specify venues, timestamps or calculation windows, so this reconstruction makes no price or return claim.

The filing also did not demonstrate future adoption, reserve growth, lower settlement costs or final regulatory approval. On July 2, 2025, the verified development was narrower but still significant: a major digital-asset company had formally asked the primary federal bank-chartering agency to supervise a purpose-built institution at the center of its stablecoin strategy.