U.S. banking agency gives blockchain bank OpenReserve initial OK to operate

The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave a new charter to OpenReserve Bank, a blockchain bank backed by a number of crypto world investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Jump Capital and Coinbase Ventures.

The OCC has preliminarily approved charters for a swelling array of banks — mostly trust companies — but in this case, OpenReserve said in its Thursday announcement that it chose a full bank charter for its business, conceived as a full-service national bank with embedded onchain settlement.

“We chose the national bank path deliberately,” said Dee Choubey, co-founder and CEO of OpenReserve, in a statement. “Supervision, safety and soundness, compliance, and customer confidence are not constraints on what we are building; they are the foundation of it.”

The Salt Lake City, Utah-based firm, which still needs a final approval from the OCC for a permanent charter, said it was “built to serve institutional customers across treasury management, stablecoin issuance, and tokenized deposits,” and in compliance with the inbound regulations of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.

“We need a bank that’s always on, always open, always available,” a16z crypto said in an online post explaining its investment decision. “A bank that never closes. A continuous bank.”

OpenReserve was also backed by Acrew, Wintermute Ventures, Clocktower, Quona, AAF Management and Zero Knowledge Ventures, it said in its statement. It submitted its application to the banking supervisor in April.

The OCC didn’t immediately respond to a request to confirm the charter approval.

The crypto industry is now awash with new, crypto-native banking names after several years of difficult relationships with the banking sector. The administration of President Donald Trump, including his appointed chief of the OCC, Jonathan Gould, has made it a point to welcome digital assets businesses into the sphere of regulated banks.

Also on Thursday, the U.S. agency approved another conditional banking charter for British fintech operation Revolut, which is set to do business from Connecticut.