Coinbase's Federal Trust Charter: $60 Million in Capital, Zero Privacy

Coinbase got its federal trust charter. The OCC approved it last Friday, licensing records show the paperwork closed Nov. 6, and the company announced it Monday. That upgrades the conditional approval from April 2, which followed an application filed back in October 2025. Coinbase National Trust Company now runs institutional custody under direct federal supervision.

The charter is narrow by design. No retail deposits. No lending. No stablecoin issuance. Staking, prime trading and financing stay inside Coinbase affiliates, with the trust acting as an intermediary. The conditions are real too. Sixty million dollars in Tier 1 capital, plus enough liquid assets to cover 180 days of operating expenses through the first three years. And no Federal Reserve master account. That takes a separate application under the Fed's access rules.

Coinbase isn't first in line. Ripple cleared final approval Oct. 26. Circle got its nod in July. Block applied in September. But Coinbase is the biggest, and it wants to drag its New York-regulated custody business, currently under DFS supervision, into the national entity over three years. That's a lot of institutional bitcoin and ether changing supervisors.

The banks fought this the whole way. The Independent Community Bankers of America asked the OCC in December to reject the application, calling Coinbase's risk and control functions "demonstrably flawed." The American Bankers Association wanted the review slowed in February. Strip the polite language and it's a deposit fight. Coinbase wants to pay rewards on stablecoin balances. Banks say that pulls money out of their vaults. Both sides are right, and neither will say it plainly. Coinbase disclosed no financial impact from any of this.

Here's my problem. Every federal charter is a single door into crypto, and single doors come with a single set of keys. A trust bank knows its clients, their balances, their movements, and it answers to one supervisor in Washington. Tidy for a pension fund. Also one subpoena away from being the most efficient surveillance pipe this industry has ever built.

If it's not private by default, it's surveillance by design.

Watch the three-year migration schedule, and watch whether the community bankers take this to court now that a Democratic Congress can't unwind a charter signed by an executive-branch regulator.