Block Applies for Banking Charter to Custody Bitcoin and Stablecoins

# Block Applies for Banking Charter to Custody Bitcoin and Stablecoins Block wants to become a bank. Jack Dorsey's company filed an application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Wednesday to set up a federally regulated trust bank called Builders Bank & Trust, N.A. The bank's main job would be holding other people's bitcoin and stablecoins as a custodian, the way a traditional bank holds stocks or bonds for clients, as reported by Bitcoin Magazine. The filing matters because custody is a chokepoint. Institutional investors, pension funds, and companies that hold bitcoin on their balance sheets need a regulated entity to store it. Right now that business is split between a handful of exchanges and specialized firms. If Builders Bank gets approved, Block would compete directly for those contracts with a federal charter behind it, per Bitcoin Magazine.

The OCC approval line is already long

Block is not the first crypto company to knock on the OCC's door. Coinbase, Circle, Crypto.com, and Paxos have all received conditional approval or are waiting for one, per Bitcoin Magazine. World Liberty Financial, the protocol backed by President Donald Trump, got the green light this year too.

The OCC charters these banks but does not run them. Once chartered, Builders Bank would follow federal banking rules: capital requirements, regular audits, and oversight of how it handles customer funds.

That is the price of legitimacy, and it is the price most crypto firms have decided is worth paying to operate inside the U.S. financial system, per Bitcoin Magazine.

Block already has a banking track record

This is not Block's first time working with federal regulators. The company operates Square Financial Services, an industrial loan company that has been chartered in Utah since 2021. That entity handles lending for Square merchants and gave Block a template for how to structure a regulated subsidiary.

Lee Woolley, who would run Builders Bank as its President and CEO, pointed to that history in Block's announcement. He cited the company's experience in digital assets and the banking expertise of the team it has assembled, per Bitcoin Magazine.

The application names bitcoin and stablecoins specifically as assets the bank would custody and manage through fiduciary services.

Custody as a business, not a feature

For Block, banking is not the end goal. It is infrastructure. The company runs Square, which last year rolled out bitcoin payments for millions of U.S. small businesses with no setup required, per Bitcoin Magazine.

It runs Cash App, which lets millions of users buy and sell bitcoin. And it makes Bitkey, a self-custody hardware wallet. A bank charter lets Block do something these products cannot: hold institutional-grade deposits and manage them under federal trust law.

That opens doors to corporate treasuries, fund administrators, and asset managers who need a chartered custodian, not just a payment app, per Bitcoin Magazine.

Dorsey's bet keeps stacking up

Jack Dorsey has been the loudest big-tech founder backing bitcoin since 2021. He pushed Square to rename itself Block, moved the company's treasury into bitcoin, and built an entire mining hardware division. The banking charter application is the next piece of that puzzle, per Bitcoin Magazine.

The OCC typically takes 12 to 18 months to process a national trust bank application. A decision on Builders Bank could come in late 2027 or early 2028. Until then, Block operates its existing financial services without a trust charter, and the custody question for its institutional clients stays unresolved, per Bitcoin Magazine.