The news: Crypto infrastructure provider Zerohash—which provides trading, transaction, and tokenization services—has applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a national trust bank charter.

Zoom out: Zerohash is Morgan Stanley’s infrastructure partner in a planned a rollout this year of the bank’s retail spot crypto trading on E*TRADE. It works with several other traditional financial institutions in addition to fintech and nonfinancial apps that make crypto transactions.

Trendspotting: The 2025 GENIUS Act sparked crypto firms’ rush to acquire federal trust charters. The banking industry has responded with acrimony:

• Stripe’s stablecoin platform, Bridge, won conditional approval from the OCC in February to create a federally chartered national trust bank. Ripple received conditional approval in January, following Circle, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos. Crypto.com and Coinbase have applications pending.
• The Bank Policy Institute is considering a lawsuit against the OCC in response to national trust bank charter approvals for crypto firms, claiming that crypto firms with bank charters could undermine the banking system’s safety and soundness. In November, the Independent Community Bankers of America urged the OCC to reject Coinbase’s application.

Implications for banks: Trade groups’ push against crypto trust charters is a misunderstanding or a distraction. Banks have every interest in heading off competition for traditional payments—when the banks themselves don’t have crypto services or plans to offer them. But megabanks and other large, traditional financial services firms have applied for their own federal trust charters. And some have already built formidable digital asset businesses.

It doesn’t benefit banks to be extremely conservative about involvement in digital assets. It’s true that the 2022 crypto crash burned those that jumped in without correctly assessing the risks. But as the regulatory environment has changed and stablecoins have matured as a payment mechanism, the untested dangers of crypto have faded. It’s time for financial institutions of all sizes to embrace the change.