World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family, has moved a major step closer to becoming a federally chartered financial institution after U.S. regulators granted preliminary approval for its proposed national trust bank.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency approved the application Friday for World Liberty Trust Company, a new national trust bank that would operate from Florida and bring several of the company’s most important cryptocurrency functions directly under federal banking supervision.

The approval is preliminary, not final.

World Liberty cannot begin operating the bank until it satisfies a series of pre-opening requirements and passes an OCC examination. The regulator retains the authority to modify, suspend or rescind the approval before the bank opens.

If those conditions are met, however, World Liberty would gain something considerably more valuable than another crypto license.

It would receive a national bank charter.

The proposed bank plans to issue and redeem World Liberty’s dollar-backed USD1 stablecoin, maintain the reserves supporting it and provide digital-asset custody services to institutional clients across the United States.

USD1 is designed to maintain a value of $1 and has grown to more than $4 billion in circulation, making it one of the larger stablecoins in the market.

Currently, BitGo handles the issuance and custody of USD1. Under World Liberty’s plan, those operations and the reserve assets supporting the stablecoin would eventually move into the new federally chartered trust bank.

That would give World Liberty considerably more control over the economics surrounding its own token.

Instead of relying on an outside institution to issue and safeguard USD1, the company could bring issuance, redemption, reserves and institutional custody together inside its own regulated banking subsidiary.

The charter would not turn World Liberty into a traditional retail bank.

The trust company would not operate like JPMorgan Chase or Bank of America by taking ordinary consumer deposits and making conventional loans. Its activities would be limited largely to trust, custody, stablecoin and related digital-asset services.

But a national charter carries another important advantage: scale.

Federal supervision can provide a clearer framework for serving institutional customers nationwide rather than navigating a patchwork of individual state regimes.

The OCC placed substantial conditions around that privilege.

World Liberty Trust must maintain at least $20 million in Tier 1 capital, with at least $10 million or half of its Tier 1 capital — whichever is greater — held in qualifying liquid assets.

The bank must also maintain enough additional liquid assets to cover at least 180 days of operating expenses during its first three years.

Major changes to its business plan will require OCC review, and senior executives and directors will face additional regulatory scrutiny during the bank’s early years.

The decision also arrives amid political scrutiny surrounding the Trump family’s financial interest in World Liberty.

Critics, including Democratic lawmakers, have questioned whether a federal agency under the Trump administration should approve a banking charter connected to a business in which the president’s family has an economic interest.

World Liberty and the administration have rejected suggestions that the company receives improper treatment, while the OCC said it evaluated the application under its existing chartering and supervisory standards.

From a business standpoint, the larger development is what the approval says about cryptocurrency’s continuing move into the regulated financial system.

Stablecoin companies once operated largely outside traditional banking.

Increasingly, they are seeking national charters, federal supervision and direct control over the reserves and custody infrastructure behind their tokens.

World Liberty is now one step closer to joining that group.

The OCC has given it a preliminary green light.

The next test is whether it can satisfy the regulator’s conditions and turn a Trump-backed crypto venture into an operating federally chartered trust bank.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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