Community Bankers Sue the OCC to Vacate Its Trust Charter Rule

The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday, asking a federal court to strike the rule that has let a string of crypto firms hold national trust bank charters. The complaint went to the US District Court for the District of Columbia under the Administrative Procedure Act, the statute that governs challenges to agency action. Its claim is that the OCC reached past what the National Bank Act allows by chartering companies whose business is largely not fiduciary. The group wants the rule and the interpretive letter under it declared unlawful and vacated, and Protego Holdings' conditionally approved charter vacated along with them. Five accounts carry the filing; none carries a response from the agency.

Two dates for one rule

The rule at issue amended the OCC's chartering regulation so that a national trust bank's permitted work is no longer described as fiduciary activity. Accounts give it two different dates. The ICBA's own Independent Banker puts the final rule at 2 March 2026, while Crypto News Flash dates it to February 2026 and says it took effect on 1 April. We could not establish which date refers to adoption and which to publication or effect, and the two do not reconcile. Crypto News Flash is also the only account read here that cites the section, 12 CFR 5.20, and the only one reporting that the agency declined to comment on pending litigation. The suit pairs the rule with Interpretive Letter No. 1176, the earlier guidance it rests on, and asks the court to void both. No outlet read here dates that letter in prose, so it is named without a year.

What the charter does not carry

The objection is about what comes attached to a federal charter. The ICBA's president and chief executive, Rebeca Romero Rainey, listed the Community Reinvestment Act obligations, consolidated supervision, capital and liquidity standards, and federal deposit insurance that apply to insured depository institutions and, on the group's reading, not to these charters.

"Congress did not create the national trust charter as a side door into the banking system for crypto firms," Romero Rainey said, in the version CoinDesk carried on Friday evening.

She also said consumers reasonably expect a federally chartered bank to carry federal protections. The Bank Policy Institute's executive vice president, Paige Pidano Paridon, was quoted by CoinDesk in the same piece saying uniform standards matter to a safe and competitive banking system. The two organisations are separate parties. Only one of them filed.

The firms on the other side

Protego is the one charter the suit asks the court to undo by name. Its entity is National Digital Trust Company, conditionally approved in February 2026. The wider set of crypto firms holding or seeking OCC trust approvals reaches across the industry, and the names appear across the accounts read here: Coinbase, Circle, Kraken through Payward National Trust Company, Paxos, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Crypto.com's Foris DAX National Trust Bank and Stripe's Bridge National Trust Bank. This desk has followed that queue as it moved, from conditional approvals for Agora, Catena and Bastion to Circle's final approval for a national trust bank. None of those firms is a defendant. The OCC is.

Where this sits now

A court could vacate a rule, a letter and a charter, or none of the three. Nothing filed sets a schedule. The ICBA calls the volume of trust applications at the OCC an influx and gives no count, and no account read here supplies one, so how much sits in the path of a ruling is not established. Firms already chartered keep operating meanwhile, because a complaint is not an injunction. What Friday does change is the arithmetic for anyone with an application pending, who now has to weigh the chance that the rule it was filed under does not survive the year.