The US banking regulator OCC granted Ripple final approval for its own trust bank on October 26, 2026. The Ripple National Trust Bank will from now on manage the reserves behind the dollar stablecoin $RLUSD, which according to the company reaches a market capitalisation of 2.5 billion dollars. For you as an investor in Germany this step changes little for now, and there is a reason for that which does not appear in the announcement itself: $RLUSD is not authorised as an e-money token in the European Union. We therefore counted for ourselves on October 27, 2026 where you can actually obtain the stablecoin.
What the OCC approval of the Ripple National Trust Bank permits
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, OCC for short, is the supervisory authority for federally chartered banks in the United States. A national trust bank is not a credit institution in the usual sense but a bank limited to trust and custody business. That is precisely the charter Ripple now holds.
In its announcement of October 26, Ripple names three approved activities: managing the segregated reserves that back Ripple USD; acting as trustee of those reserves for the benefit of $RLUSD holders; and the fiduciary custody of digital assets. The technical term for the last of these is fiduciary custody: the bank holds assets belonging to others in its own name, but for the account and in the interest of the entitled party, and is liable for them under trust law.
