OCC Clears OpenReserve for a National Bank on a $210M Condition

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has given OpenReserve Bank preliminary conditional approval to organise a full-service national bank in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company must put up at least $210 million in initial paid-in capital and hold a Tier 1 leverage ratio of 12% or better through its first three years. It has 12 months to raise that money and 18 months to open. Miss either deadline and the approval lapses. The coverage landed on Friday; three of the accounts read for this piece date the OCC's action to Wednesday 2 September, and The Block's report does not name the date on the letter.

A bank charter, not a trust charter

The distinction is the story. Coinbase and Ripple took national trust charters, which let a firm hold customer assets in custody but not take deposits or lend against them. OpenReserve asked for the full thing. Its co-founder put the choice plainly in comments carried by Decrypt and TheStreet on Friday, both outlets quoting the same sentence.

"We chose the national bank path deliberately," Choubey said.

crypto.news writes his name as Dee Choubey; Decrypt, TheStreet and The Crypto Basic use Diwakar. Same person, two forms on the record. He founded the company in 2025 with Richard Correia. What the bank says it will do runs long: deposits and lending, payments and treasury services, tokenized deposits, digital asset custody, foreign correspondent banking. A wholly-owned subsidiary is planned for reserve-backed dollar stablecoins under the GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law that sets reserve and disclosure terms for issuers, and that application has not been filed.

The seed round nobody agrees on

$210 million is a long way from what the company has raised. The Block, TheStreet and The Crypto Basic all put the seed round at $25 million, led by a16z crypto, with Jump Capital, Acrew, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, Clocktower, Quona, AAF Management and Zero Knowledge Ventures alongside it. crypto.news, reporting the same approval the same morning, says the amounts were not disclosed. The two readings do not reconcile and neither account refers to the other. On TheStreet's dating, the capital deadline falls in September 2027 and the opening deadline in March 2028.

What still has to clear

Preliminary approval is permission to build, not a licence to trade. crypto.news is the only outlet reviewed here that lists the remaining steps, and it says the bank must obtain Federal Reserve Bank stock and FDIC deposit insurance, give 60 days' notice of its intended opening date, and pass a preopening examination covering operational readiness, governance and technology security. That account stands unverified against the others. None of them says how many preliminary approvals in this cohort have reached final approval.

The queue it joins

OpenReserve is not alone in the pipeline. The Block and The Crypto Basic both report that the OCC has received 40 de novo charter applications since 2025 and approved 21, with conditional approvals in that group for Coinbase, Paxos, BitGo, Ripple and Circle. Their wording is close enough that it reads as one count carried twice, not two counts that match. Deposit-taking is the piece most of those charters leave out, and that is what makes the planned stablecoin subsidiary matter: an institution that can hold deposits and issue a token sits nearer to the dollar stablecoin 21 banks and asset managers are building for 2027 than a custodian ever gets. Whether OpenReserve finds $210 million by next September is the first test of any of it.