OCC Grants Agora Conditional Approval for a National Trust Bank Charter
The preliminary approval would let Agora issue dollar-backed stablecoins and offer custody, payment, settlement and fiduciary investment services under a single federal charter. Agora still has to clear capital, liquidity and governance conditions, and any stablecoin activity must conform to the GENIUS Act, before it can open for business.
WASHINGTON — The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Sept. 18 granted preliminary conditional approval for Agora to operate as a national trust bank, one of three digital-asset firms — alongside Bastion and Catena — that the agency moved forward that day as part of a broader wave of trust-charter applications tied to stablecoin infrastructure.
Agora's proposed business model, as described in the OCC's order, centers on issuing dollar-backed stablecoins, maintaining the reserves behind them, providing digital-asset custody, and offering payment, settlement and fiduciary investment advisory services to institutional clients. The charter would let the company consolidate those functions under one federal supervisor instead of the state-by-state trust and money-transmitter licenses that most stablecoin issuers currently rely on.
The approval is not final. Agora must still satisfy specific preopening requirements around capital, liquidity, governance and compliance before the OCC will authorize it to commence business, and the agency's order requires that any stablecoin activity conform to the GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin framework Congress passed in 2025. As with other national trust charters, Agora would not be permitted to accept deposits and would not carry FDIC insurance.
The OCC has said it has received roughly 40 de novo bank applications over the past 18 months, a volume that agency officials have attributed largely to stablecoin issuers and custody providers seeking the legitimacy and regulatory uniformity of a federal charter rather than a patchwork of state approvals. Agora, Bastion and Catena's approvals the same week suggest the agency is now moving several of those applications through its pipeline in parallel rather than one at a time.
For institutional counterparties evaluating which stablecoin infrastructure providers to work with, a national trust charter functions largely as a credibility signal rather than a guarantee of safety — the charter governs custody and fiduciary conduct, not deposit insurance or lender-of-last-resort access. How quickly Agora can clear the OCC's remaining conditions, and what its capital and liquidity requirements ultimately look like, will do more to determine its competitive position than the conditional approval itself.