Overview
- Morgan Stanley filed on Feb. 18 to create “Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, National Association,” seeking an OCC national trust charter to offer crypto custody along with trading, swaps, staking, and transfers.
- Citigroup plans to launch institutional bitcoin custody this year, integrating it into existing custody, reporting, and tax workflows with unified accounts and cross‑margining across crypto and traditional assets.
- The OCC’s broadened language replaces “fiduciary activities” with “operations of a trust company and activities related thereto,” formally clarifying custody and related trust operations as permitted primary activities.
- Conditional national trust approvals already include Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos, with later approvals for Bridge (Stripe) and Crypto.com as major firms build federally overseen digital‑asset services.
- State regulators and policy groups challenge the OCC’s approach as overreach, access to Federal Reserve payment rails remains unresolved despite reported exploration by Governor Chris Waller, and Anchorage Digital Bank remains the only fully operational national bank in this cohort.