On 2 October 2026 the Independent Community Bankers of America sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Comptroller, Jonathan V. Gould, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. The complaint says the OCC’s 2 March 2026 final rule, National Bank Chartering, at 91 FR 9977, and Interpretive Letter 1176 from January 2021, claim a power Congress did not give: chartering national trust banks that do substantial non-fiduciary business, including crypto custody, trading, and related services, without the duties that apply to a bank that takes deposits.
A complaint is the plaintiff’s theory on the day it is filed. It is not a judgment. Conditional approvals the OCC has already signed stay in place unless the agency or a court undoes them. “Crypto banks were shut” is the caption this suit will attract. The instrument is a lawsuit under the Administrative Procedure Act.
What happened
ICBA, a trade group for smaller banks, asks the court to hold the rule and the letter unlawful and to vacate them. It also asks the court to vacate the conditional approval of Protego’s proposed national trust bank. That approval is the OCC’s Corporate Decision 1366 of 13 February 2026, for National Digital Trust Company, a Protego Holdings subsidiary in Seattle. The decision describes four lines of business aimed at crypto: custody, trading among customers whose assets the bank custodies, lending and borrowing of custodied crypto, and issuer services for tokenization the customer, not the bank, would issue. Staking, governance voting, and treasury work show up as fiduciary add-ons. Conditional means the firm still has to meet pre-opening requirements. It is not a teller window that opened in February.
The complaint’s legal claim is narrow and worth reading past the press quote. In 1978 Congress said a national bank is not illegally constituted solely because the Comptroller has limited it to trust-company operations and related activities. ICBA says that sentence lets the OCC limit a bank to fiduciary work. It does not, in the group’s view, let the OCC hand a national charter to a firm whose main business is non-fiduciary crypto. The OCC’s decisions say the opposite: trust-company operations have long included non-fiduciary custody and safekeeping. A court will pick a reading. This page will not.
Other crypto-related trust papers exist and are not the approval this complaint asks to undo. On 2 April 2026 the OCC issued Corporate Decision 1370, a conditional approval for Coinbase National Trust Company. Anchorage Digital Bank has been an OCC national trust bank for years; a February 2026 supervisory letter ended an older operating agreement. Those are different files. Do not let a headline treat every trust application as Protego, or Protego as already open, or a lawsuit against the chartering rule as a receivership.
Why it matters
A national trust charter can sound like a bank. If the firm does not take deposits, the charter is not FDIC insurance, and customers are not depositors with the insurance a community bank advertises. ICBA’s point, whether or not a judge agrees, is that people will hear “federally chartered” and assume the protections that attach to an insured bank: deposit insurance, the Community Reinvestment Act, a thicker capital rule, a supervisor who has actually wound up an uninsured bank in living memory. The OCC has said it has not managed an uninsured-bank receivership in nearly a century. That sentence is in the public argument. It is a fact about experience, not a prediction that one of these firms will fail.
If you leave coins with a trust company, you have a custody agreement. You do not have a wallet whose keys only you hold, and you do not have a deposit account because the logo says national. See how crypto wallets actually work, and an exchange balance is an IOU, not a wallet. A trust charter is a third costume for the same question: who can sign, and what is left if they cannot. The SEC’s 1 October custody proposal, which would let some advisers use state trust companies, is a different agency and a proposal. This lawsuit does not decide that proposal.
Community banks are also arguing about competition: a lighter charter for firms that offer services overlapping a bank, without the same cost. That is an industry fight. It is not a reason for a reader to move, or not move, a balance this week.
What happens next
The OCC will answer. The court may or may not grant a pause while the case runs. A win for ICBA would put the rule, the letter, and the Protego approval back in play. A loss would leave the chartering path where the OCC put it. Neither result is a new bitcoin, and neither is permission to treat a conditional letter as a finished bank. Watch the docket, not a banner that says crypto is now a bank or is no longer allowed to be one.
Not legal advice. Not a recommendation of any bank, trust company, exchange, or crypto asset. Not an instruction to move coins because a trade group sued.
