The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday, asking a federal judge in Washington to void the agency's trust chartering rule and the charters that crypto companies have received under it.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that the OCC has read the National Bank Act to authorize something the statute never granted: national trust banks that neither take deposits nor, in any substantial sense, act as fiduciaries. The rule at issue was finalized in March and took effect April 1. It amended the OCC's chartering regulation to clarify that a national bank limited to the operations of a trust company may engage in non-fiduciary activities alongside its fiduciary ones, a reading the agency first advanced in an interpretive letter during the first Trump administration.
The practical stakes are larger than the technical question suggests. A national trust charter is a federal license to operate inside the banking system. The community bankers argue that crypto firms are using it to get the privileges of that system while skipping the obligations, and that Congress never agreed to the trade.
Twenty-one charters, and thirteen of them crypto
According to the complaint, the OCC has approved twenty-one trust banks during the Trump administration, conditionally or otherwise, and at least thirteen of those are crypto companies. The list includes World Liberty Financial, the venture tied to the Trump family, along with Coinbase and Circle, two of the largest names in the industry.
Community banks have objected to the charters for as long as the agency has been granting them. The lawsuit escalates that campaign from comment letters and lobbying into litigation, and it does so against a rule rather than one approval at a time, which puts the whole chartering pathway in front of a single judge.
An OCC spokesperson said Friday that the agency does not comment on pending litigation.
A charter that is not quite a bank
Trust banks occupy a narrow slot in federal banking law. They exist to manage money on behalf of others, and the National Bank Act gives the comptroller authority to charter them for fiduciary work. They are not insured depository institutions, which means their customers do not get deposit insurance, and they are not treated as banks under the Bank Holding Company Act, which means the Federal Reserve does not supervise their parent companies the way it supervises the parent of a bank that takes deposits.
That combination is what makes the charter attractive to crypto firms and what makes it dangerous, in the ICBA's telling. A firm operating as a national trust bank can offer services that look to customers like banking, the group argues, while sitting outside the capital, liquidity and consumer protection framework that applies to the institutions it competes with. Because those requirements are expensive, crypto trust banks can run at a lower cost and undercut community banks on price, the lawsuit says.
The dispute over the fiduciary label is not semantic. Trust charters were built for firms that manage other people's money under a duty of loyalty and care, and the businesses that crypto companies want to run inside a trust bank include holding customer assets and the activities that surround custody, which fall outside the fiduciary definition the ICBA says the statute requires. Lee Reiners, a lecturing fellow at Duke University, made the point in a blog post earlier this year, writing that the rule permits the agency to charter uninsured trust banks engaged in non-fiduciary crypto business while avoiding the framework that applies to traditional banks.
The complaint dwells on what happens if one of these institutions fails. Trust banks cannot receive deposits, so their customers have no insurance claim on the federal safety net. The ICBA argues that the OCC's receivership framework, built for insured banks, has never been tested on an uninsured institution of the scale that some of these firms could reach.
"American consumers reasonably expect a federally chartered bank to carry federal protections," Rebeca Romero Rainey, the group's president and chief executive, said in a statement. She added that any firm seeking the benefits of a national charter should have to meet the same standards as community banks.
The stablecoin law made the charter worth having
The charters would be a curiosity if not for a law Congress passed last year. The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, created a federal framework for payment stablecoins and split issuers into two tiers. State-qualified issuers are capped at ten billion dollars of outstanding stablecoins. A firm that wants to issue at a larger scale needs to qualify at the federal level, and holding a national trust charter is a direct route to that status.
The result is a lineup of applications. The OCC saw a sharp increase in trust charter requests from crypto companies after the stablecoin law passed, since the license now carries a business reason beyond prestige: it is the difference between serving one state's market and serving the country's.
Read against that, the rule the ICBA is challenging is the piece of plumbing that connects a stablecoin law to the banking charter system. Strip out the chartering rule and the federal pathway narrows, at least until the agency writes a new one.
That pathway is not the only piece still under construction. The stablecoin law left the details of the federal issuer regime to the regulators, and the OCC has been running a separate rulemaking to implement it. The result is a framework that exists in outline, with the parts that decide which firms can use it still being written in the same period that a court is being asked to review one of them.
What the community bankers say the statute allows
The ICBA's case rests on the Administrative Procedures Act and on a straightforward reading of the National Bank Act. The group argues that the comptroller may charter national banks to perform fiduciary activities, and that the March rule stretches that authority past its limit by blessing institutions that are not fiduciaries in substance. In the complaint's phrasing, the interpretive letter and the final rule assert powers to charter national trust banks that the statute does not authorize.
The lawsuit also makes a second, procedural claim. Under the APA, an agency must respond meaningfully to significant comments before finalizing a rule. The ICBA argues the OCC did not grapple with the warnings it received about the risks the rule creates for the banking system, which would make the rule arbitrary and capricious even if the underlying authority existed.
One approval drew particular attention in the complaint. The ICBA opposed the OCC's decision to clear Protego Holdings Corporation this year, telling the agency that the firm and others like it had governance structures without independent oversight. In the lawsuit, the group describes those companies as at serious risk of failure if the crypto market falls sharply.
Chevron is gone, and the question is now the court's
The timing of the challenge matters. In 2024 the Supreme Court ended the doctrine that courts should defer to an agency's reading of an ambiguous statute. Under that decision, a judge deciding whether the National Bank Act authorizes a given charter asks what the statute means, not whether the agency's interpretation is a reasonable one. The ICBA has built its complaint around exactly that opening, which suggests the group believes the statute's text is on its side.
The counterargument is not frivolous. The OCC's rule states that it is clarifying longstanding authority rather than creating new powers, which is the posture agencies prefer when defending a rule against a statutory authority claim. If the agency can show that national trust banks have long been understood to include firms conducting some non-fiduciary business, the ICBA has to persuade the court that the 2026 rule changed the law rather than restating it. That is a factual question about banking history as much as a legal one.
Both readings are contestable, and the case is at its earliest stage. The OCC has not yet filed a response, and nothing in the complaint has been proven.
What a ruling would move
If the ICBA wins, the immediate effect is on the rule itself. A court that finds a rule exceeds statutory authority typically vacates it and returns the question to the agency, which would leave the charters already granted in an uncertain position and the stablecoin framework's federal pathway without its banking on-ramp.
If the OCC wins, the chartering pathway survives with a judicial endorsement, and the community banks are back to arguing their case to Congress, where the stablecoin law's tiering could be revisited.
Either way, the case gives the courts a role in a question that has so far been settled by agency interpretation. That is a slower venue than the one the industry has used until now, and it comes with a feature the lobbying route lacks: a ruling applies to everyone at once. A decision that the comptroller cannot charter non-fiduciary trust banks would not be limited to the thirteen crypto charters the ICBA counts. It would rewrite the terms on which any company, in any sector, can use a trust charter to reach federal status. The rule's fate will turn on whether a charter is a bundle of privileges the comptroller may hand out selectively, or a package of privileges and obligations that cannot be separated. The banking industry has argued the second view for decades. The crypto industry has built a business model on the first. A judge in Washington now has to pick.
Primary sources
- American Banker for the filing of the lawsuit, its venue and legal claims, the count of trust charters approved, the ICBA's statement and the OCC's decision not to comment.
- The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's final rule on national bank chartering, published in the Federal Register on March 2, 2026 and effective April 1, 2026, for the text and stated purpose of the amendment.
- Congress.gov for the GENIUS Act, S. 1582 of the 119th Congress, for the federal and state qualified payment stablecoin issuer tiers and the ten billion dollar threshold for state supervision.
- The Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo for the end of judicial deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes.