Overview
- Morgan Stanley filed on Feb. 18 to form Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, a de novo national trust bank that would offer crypto custody along with trading, swaps, transfers and staking.
- Citigroup plans to launch institutional bitcoin custody later this year, aiming to let clients hold BTC alongside securities and cash with cross‑margining and standard SWIFT or API instructions.
- The OCC’s wording change replaces a narrow fiduciary focus with broader trust‑company operations, explicitly allowing custody and safekeeping as a core business for national trust banks.
- Multiple crypto firms hold conditional OCC approvals, including Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, Stripe’s Bridge and Crypto.com, yet few have fully opened, with Anchorage a notable exception.
- Industry and state banking groups, including the Bank Policy Institute and CSBS, question the OCC’s authority and warn of “Franken‑charters,” while access to Federal Reserve payment services remains unresolved.