OCC Grants OpenReserve Preliminary National Bank Charter

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has granted OpenReserve Bank preliminary conditional approval to charter a full-service national bank. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz and other venture investors, the company plans to build a bank running continuous blockchain-based settlement. Before it can open its doors to customers, it still has to clear a set of strict financial requirements.

What the OCC approved

The decision came on Sept. 2 and closed out a review of the application filed on April 13, meaning the process took just under five months. The bank will be based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Per its founders' pitch, it will run as an "always-on" institution, with settlement happening continuously on-chain instead of through the batch processing behind ACH transfers and wires that traditional banks rely on.

The approval granted so far is preliminary and conditional, not a final license. The OCC attached specific financial requirements to the decision, and the company will have to prove it can meet them before the regulator allows it to actually serve customers. The OCC is the federal regulator that charters and supervises national banks, so any company seeking full bank status in the US has to go through this agency specifically. Traditional transfers through ACH move in batches and can take a client several days to clear, while OpenReserve's blockchain model promises settlement around the clock, at any hour.

Who is behind OpenReserve

OpenReserve Bank was founded by Diwakar Choubey, previously CEO of fintech firm MoneyLion, and Richard Correia. The company raised its starting capital through a $25 million seed round led by a16z crypto, with Coinbase Ventures, Jump Capital, and Wintermute Ventures among the other investors.

In a statement on the approval, Choubey called choosing the harder path of a full banking license a deliberate move. The company's business plan centers on tokenized deposits, treasury management, foreign correspondent banking, and a banking-as-a-service platform for institutional clients. MoneyLion, which Choubey previously led, is a publicly traded US fintech company focused on consumer financial products.

Conditions for the bank to open

The approval comes with specific numbers attached. OpenReserve must raise at least $210 million in initial paid-in capital, net of organizational costs, and maintain a Tier 1 leverage ratio of at least 12% through its first three years of operation.

• The capital has to be raised by September 2027.
• The bank has to actually open by March 2028.
• Missing either deadline voids the preliminary approval.
• A separate license will be required for the subsidiary that plans to issue stablecoins.

The OCC typically sets these numeric thresholds on a case-by-case basis, depending on the business model and the risks it sees in a given project. For a company building settlement infrastructure on a blockchain, the requirement to hold a higher leverage buffer is meant to offset the lack of the multi-year credit history that traditional banks typically carry.

Other bank applications this week

Most well-known crypto companies, Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, Paxos, and BitGo among them, received national trust charters from the OCC rather than full bank charters. That status allows custody and fiduciary work but blocks deposit-taking and lending. OpenReserve chose the full bank status, which, once finally approved, will open the door to both at once.

The same week, the OCC granted a similar preliminary approval to British neobank Revolut for a national bank based in Connecticut. Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould has openly framed this as a push to bring companies working with new technology into the federally supervised banking system. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, though, argued back in May that a string of such approvals for crypto companies violates US banking law, writing that the firms "look like crypto banks, not trust companies." The regulator has faced similar pushback before: in August the OCC, despite those objections, approved a national trust charter for the Trump-linked World Liberty stablecoin venture, so the debate over where a bank ends and a crypto company begins has been running at the OCC for months.

The company also plans a separate subsidiary to issue and redeem reserve-backed dollar stablecoins. Tokens like USDT and USDC already run on a similar model, though that application hasn't been filed with the OCC yet, and it will need to comply with the federal GENIUS Act, which took effect in July last year specifically to regulate dollar-backed stablecoins. More crypto companies, including major crypto exchanges, are applying for banking or trust licenses in the US.