Quick Take
- In a letter, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted World Liberty Trust Company, National Association conditional approval, bringing it one step closer to a final approval for a bank charter.
- WLF CEO Zack Witkoff said the company wants to “build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy.”
President Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial secured preliminary approval to become a national trust bank on Friday.
In a letter, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted World Liberty Trust Company, National Association conditional approval, bringing it one step closer to a final approval for a bank charter.
“The OCC hereby grants preliminary conditional approval of your charter application upon determining that your proposal meets certain regulatory and policy requirements,” the regulator said in its letter.
Earlier this year, WLF created a new trust company in order to secure a banking license from the OCC that it said would allow it to offer stablecoin issuance and redemption, on-ramp and off-ramp services, and custody and conversion. WLF issues a stablecoin called USD1, which has a market capitalization of $4 billion and ranks as the fourth-largest stablecoin after Tether and USDC.
Earlier, WLF said it also plans to serve institutional customers, such as market makers, exchanges, and investment firms. The conditional approval means that WLF would still need final approval and that the OCC could rescind it.
On Friday, in a post on X, WLF CEO Zack Witkoff said the company wants to “build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy.” He is also the son of Trump's Middle East special envoy, Steve Witkoff.
Other crypto firms have received conditional approvals over the past year, including Coinbase, Paxos, BitGo, Ripple and Circle as the OCC takes a friendly stance toward the industry. The OCC's top chief, Jonathan Gould, was previously a chief legal officer at Bitfury and has said that entities that engage in crypto and other novel technologies should “have a pathway to become federally supervised banks.”
WLF's close ties to the administration have raised concerns among Democratic lawmakers. In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Gould demanding that he stop the OCC's review of WLF's bank application until Trump divests from the company and halts conflicts of interest.
Financial disclosures released in June showed that Trump received millions of dollars connected to World Liberty Financial (WLFI).
“If the application is approved, you would promulgate rules that influence the profitability of the President‘s company,” Warren said in the letter. “You would also be responsible for directly supervising and enforcing the law against the President’s company—and its competitors.”
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