SoFi Bank launched crypto trading under its national charter

SoFi Bank, N.A. launched SoFi Crypto on November 11, 2025, beginning a phased rollout that allowed consumers to buy, sell and hold digital assets through the same application they used for banking and other financial services. The development put cryptocurrency execution and custody directly inside a nationally chartered bank rather than routing customers only to a separate exchange or brokerage affiliate.

The verified event was the launch, not universal availability. SoFi said access would expand to additional members over the following weeks. It identified bitcoin, ether and solana among the supported assets but described the full selection only as “dozens” of cryptocurrencies in its announcement.

A bank product with a crucial insurance boundary

SoFi presented the service as the first consumer crypto-trading product offered by a nationally chartered bank. Contemporaneous reporting from The Block described it as SoFi’s first directly integrated cryptocurrency offering since the company obtained its national bank charter. The “first” designation remained a company claim on November 11, however, and the surviving public record does not provide a comprehensive census of every national bank’s customer products.

The legal identity of the provider mattered. SoFi’s disclosures stated that the products and services were offered by SoFi Bank, N.A., which is regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Customers could fund purchases using money held in SoFi checking or savings accounts without first transferring that money to an external trading venue.

That integration did not extend federal deposit insurance to cryptocurrency. SoFi expressly said digital assets were not bank deposits, were not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, were not guaranteed by a bank and could lose all their value. The cash account and the crypto account therefore sat inside one interface but retained materially different legal protections and risk characteristics.

Regulatory guidance opened the route

The launch followed a significant change in federal banking guidance earlier in 2025. On March 7, the OCC issued Interpretive Letter 1183, reaffirming that national banks could conduct specified custody, distributed-ledger and stablecoin activities while rescinding a prior supervisory non-objection process.

The more directly relevant step came on May 7, when OCC Interpretive Letter 1184 confirmed that national banks and federal savings associations could buy and sell assets held in custody at a customer’s direction. It also said banks could outsource permissible cryptocurrency custody and execution services to third parties, subject to appropriate third-party risk management. The OCC continued to require such activities to be conducted safely, soundly and in compliance with applicable law.

SoFi had connected its planned return to Interpretive Letters 1183 and 1184 in a June 25 announcement. The November 11 rollout consequently represented an early consumer-facing test of how the OCC’s clarified permissions could move from regulatory text into a national bank’s product line.

A return, not SoFi’s first encounter with crypto

The service also reversed an earlier retreat. On November 29, 2023, SoFi announced that it would discontinue the crypto services then provided through SoFi Digital Assets, LLC. Customers were offered migration to Blockchain.com or liquidation, and SoFi said trading through that service would end in December 2023.

The 2025 product was institutionally different: SoFi identified the national bank itself as the provider. That distinction made the launch more consequential than a routine addition of tokens to a fintech application. It showed a federally supervised bank using newly clarified custody and execution authority to place digital-asset trading alongside insured deposit products.

What remained uncertain on November 11

The announcement did not disclose completed rollout numbers, transaction volume, customer asset balances, spreads, custody allocations or an independently audited security assessment. It also outlined future stablecoin, lending and infrastructure ambitions, but those were plans rather than launched products. The evidence supports a phased bank-operated crypto launch on November 11, 2025; it does not establish adoption, profitability, market impact or the eventual performance of the service.