Original title: The stablecoin bill is in hand, and Wall Street bankers are restless
With the stablecoin coming ashore, the ceiling of US crypto finance has been opened again.
Just last night, the U.S. House of Representatives officially passed the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, which gave the stablecoin track a landing system and set a clear regulatory tone for the entire digital asset industry. The White House subsequently announced that Trump will personally sign the GENIUS Act this Friday. From now on, stablecoins are no longer experiments in the gray area, but official monetary tools that will be written into U.S. law and endorsed by the state.
Almost at the same time, the three major financial regulatory giants, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC and the OCC, jointly issued guidance a few days ago, clarifying for the first time that US banks can provide crypto asset custody services to customers. Banks and institutions on Wall Street can no longer hold back.
Traditional banks hold high the banner of stablecoins
As the second largest bank in the United States, Bank of America (BoA) officially confirmed that it is actively preparing stablecoin products and considering cooperating with other financial institutions to launch them. It also stated that we are ready, but we are still waiting for further clarity from the market and regulation.
We have done a lot of preparatory work. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said that they are currently conducting in-depth research on customer needs, will launch stablecoin products at the appropriate time, and may cooperate with other financial institutions.
At the same time, Bank of America also launched a weekly on-chain research report called On Chain, which explicitly focuses on stablecoins, RWA, payment settlement and infrastructure. The release of On Chain comes at a critical week in Washington, where lawmakers are considering the GENIUS Act, the CLARITY Act and the Anti-Central Bank Digital Currency Monitoring Act, all of which may affect the direction of US policy on stablecoins and digital infrastructure.
The research team pointed out that rather than hype, we are concerned about the architecture that can truly change the underlying finance, and emphasized that Ethereum is expected to play a core role in promoting the interconnection of digital assets. They even revealed that they have been piloting stablecoin cooperation with mainstream retail platforms such as Shopify, Coinbase, and Stripe, with the goal of allowing stablecoins to break through the original gameplay and bring a new business model.
As long as regulation is clear, banks are ready to accept cryptocurrency payments, said Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America.
Citibank also has an attitude of waiting for the wind to come and take off.
Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi, made it clear that the bank is actively promoting stablecoin-related plans and regards it as an important cornerstone of future international payments. Citis bet on stablecoins is a reflection on global cross-border payments: high fees and slow arrival. Currently, the hidden costs of cross-border transactions are often as high as 7%, and the existing interbank network is far inferior to on-chain solutions in terms of availability and efficiency. Citis goal is to use stablecoins to build a new all-weather, programmable payment track, allowing corporate customers to transfer money to anywhere in the world at low cost and high efficiency.
As an old friend in the cryptocurrency circle, JPMorgan Chase is moving faster.
On June 18, JPMorgan Chase announced that it would pilot a deposit token called JPMD, which would be deployed on the Base blockchain supported by Coinbase. Initially, the token will only be used by JPMorgan Chases institutional clients, and will be gradually expanded to a wider user group and more currencies after US regulatory approval.
This is the first time that a Wall Street giant has issued traditional bank deposits directly on the chain, marking a key step in the deep integration of traditional finance and the decentralized world. JPMD is a permitted deposit token that corresponds 1:1 to JPMorgan Chases US dollar deposits, supports 24-hour real-time transfers, has a transaction cost as low as $0.01, and enjoys traditional financial guarantees such as deposit insurance and interest.
Compared with existing stablecoins, JPMD has stronger regulatory compliance and trust endorsement, and is expected to bring unprecedented capital volume and institutional liquidity to the Base chain. Naveen Mallela, head of JPM blockchain, said: This is not about embracing encryption, but redefining banks.
Looking at the entire U.S. banking industry, the speed of this wave of stablecoins entering the market and running on the blockchain has far exceeded the most optimistic expectations of the crypto community. The real wave of financial reform has arrived.
The green light is on, can traditional banks also buy Bitcoin?
The green light is on, and traditional finance is moving in quickly. The barriers between banks and cryptocurrencies are collapsing. This is extremely good for cryptocurrencies.
As Merlijn, the founder of Profitz Academy, said, on July 14, the three major US bank regulators, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC and the OCC , jointly stated that banks must establish a comprehensive risk governance system in key management, asset screening, network security, audit supervision, third-party custody and compliance risk control when providing related services.
Although no new regulations have been formulated, this guidance systematically clarifies for the first time the expectations of regulators for crypto custody services. Crypto finance is moving from a gray experimental field to a regulatory track, and traditional finance is no longer standing idly by.
This signal quickly triggered a market response. Wall Street giants have disclosed the latest progress of their cryptocurrency businesses such as coin offerings, trying to gain an advantage in the new round of financial infrastructure reconstruction. At the same time, crypto-native institutions such as Circle and Ripple are also actively promoting compliance processes, intending to consolidate their market position as the global regulatory framework gradually takes shape.
This also means that the boundaries between banks, crypto asset management and trading platforms in the future are beginning to blur. Traditional banks are even seizing the market share of crypto asset management and trading platforms.
The Crypto Melee Between Traditional Banks and Native Asset Management
On July 15, Standard Chartered Bank announced that it would provide spot trading services for Bitcoin and Ethereum to its institutional clients. It is the first systemically important bank (G-SIBs) in the world to do so. The business will be launched in London, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt first, initially covering Asia and Europe. In the future, it will be available 24/7 and directly connected to traditional foreign exchange platforms. Corporate clients and asset management companies no longer need to go around in circles or climb over the wall to open accounts. They can buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum directly like foreign exchange operations, and can choose self-operated or third-party services for settlement and custody.
In fact, Standard Chartered Bank has already laid out digital asset custody and trading through Zodia Custody and Zodia Markets several years ago. This time, it is just going public and opening up all the accumulation. Rene Michau, the global head of digital assets at Standard Chartered, made it clear: the spot crypto business will first promote BTC and ETH, and will expand to more crypto products in the future, including forward, structured, non-principal delivery and other contracts, which are completely aligned with the business line of the crypto trading platform.
At the same time, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and others are also preparing to launch cryptocurrency custody and related services. What you thought was impossible in the past is now a fait accompli. 12 months ago, you were still doubting whether JPMorgan Chase would custody Bitcoin. Now the only question is which bank will grab the largest share first.
Also worthy of attention are the new-style banks - such as Londons Revolut, which relies on crypto trading to support a large part of its revenue. Its long-term goal is to apply for a local US banking license and completely enter the mainstream financial ecosystem.
Peter Thiels ambition: to build a new Silicon Valley Bank
In addition to asset custody and seizing market share of crypto-native asset management and trading platforms, Wall Streets ambitious investors have also found new entry points in account services and credit support.
Several mainstream financial media outlets have confirmed that Peter Thiel is co-founding a new bank called Erebor with tech tycoons Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale, and has formally applied to the U.S. Federal Currency Comptroller OCC for a national bank license. The banks target customers are cryptocurrency, AI, defense, and manufacturing startups that mainstream banks are unwilling to serve, attempting to become a replacement for Silicon Valley Bank after its collapse.
The sponsors of this bank also have distinct Silicon Valley political capital intersection characteristics: Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, helmsman of Founders Fund), Palmer Luckey (founder of Oculus, co-founder of Anduril), Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir, founder of 8 VC). All three are important political donors to Trump in the 2024 US presidential election and are closely related to the GENIUS Act currently being promoted by Congress.
According to the application documents submitted by Erebor to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Founders Fund will participate in the investment as the main capital supporter, and the three founders will not participate in daily management, but only participate in the governance structure as directors. The bank management will be served by former Circle consultant and CEO of compliance software company Aer Compliance, with the intention of clearly drawing a clear line between politics and operations and highlighting its application positioning as an institutionalized financial institution.
Drawing lessons from Silicon Valley Bank, Erebor explicitly proposed to implement a 1:1 deposit reserve system and control the loan/deposit ratio below 50% to prevent maturity mismatch and credit expansion from the source. Its application documents show that stablecoin services are one of the core businesses of the bank. It plans to support the custody, minting and redemption of compliant stablecoins such as USDC, DAI, and RLUSD, and create the most fully regulated stablecoin trading institution to provide enterprises with legal and compliant fiat currency in and out channels and on-chain asset services.
Its customer profile is also precise: it targets innovative enterprises, employees and investors that are considered high-risk by traditional banks, such as virtual currency, artificial intelligence, national defense technology and high-end manufacturing; it also serves international customers - overseas institutions that have difficulty entering the US dollar financial system, rely on US dollar clearing or hope to use stablecoins to reduce cross-border transaction costs. Erebor plans to serve as a super interface for these enterprises to connect to the US dollar system by establishing agent banking relationships.
Its business model is also quite crypto-native: deposits and loan services are collateralized by Bitcoin and Ethereum, and it does not engage in traditional mortgages or car loans; at the same time, it holds a small amount of BTC and ETH on its balance sheet for operational needs (such as paying gas fees), and does not participate in speculative transactions. It is worth noting that Erebor has also drawn a clear regulatory boundary: it does not provide asset custody services that require a trust license, only provides on-chain fund settlement, and does not directly custody user assets.
In short, this is an advanced version of Silicon Valley Bank. Driven by various crypto-friendly policies, Erebor is very likely to strive to become the first dollar relay bank to custody mainstream stablecoins such as USDC and RLUSD in a compliant manner, providing a federal clearing path for stablecoins.
Related reading: Peter Thiel personally organized Erebor to be the replacement of Silicon Valley Bank
National Banking License, the Future of Crypto Banking
With the dust settling on the stablecoin bill and the green light from Washington, everyone can see that the next qualifying race for Wall Street bankers has quietly begun.
The National Trust Bank Charter is an important point in this qualifying competition. This is one of the ceiling-level licenses in the U.S. financial system and the most realistic path for all crypto assets, institutional custody and stablecoin companies to enter the mainstream financial system.
The US banking system consists of three core federal licenses: National Bank, Federal Savings Association (FSA) and National Trust Bank. The first two are traditional banks and savings associations with a long history, high barriers to entry and outrageous thresholds. The National Trust Bank license is designed specifically for trust, custody, pension and other businesses, which coincides with the needs of new players in the crypto community who want to hold coins in compliance with regulations.
Its value is higher than most people imagine. First of all, the National Trust Bank license is equivalent to an interstate pass. As long as you get this license, you can do business in all 50 states in the United States without having to apply for it state by state. In addition, this license allows licensed institutions to provide customers with institutional-level asset custody, digital currency custody, corporate trusts, pension management and other diversified financial services. Although it cannot absorb retail deposits or issue loans, this is perfectly in line with the rigid needs of crypto custodians - what everyone wants is asset security and legal currency custody, and the title of compliance and transparency.
More importantly, this is a license directly issued by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which is a federal-level banking license. With this license, crypto companies can apply to access the Federal Reserves payment and clearing system, greatly improving capital liquidity and settlement efficiency.
Anchorage Digital: The first crypto custodian bank
The first crypto asset management company to take the plunge in the industry is Anchorage Digital.
Anchorage Digital was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in California. It is a technology finance company that focuses on digital asset custody services, specializing in providing secure and compliant digital asset storage and custody services to institutional clients (such as funds, family offices, and trading platforms).
Before 2020, crypto asset companies could only legally conduct custody business through state-level trust licenses (such as the New York BitLicense and the South Dakota Trust License), which greatly limited their business scope and reputation.
But in 2020, the OCC welcomed a friendly ally in the cryptocurrency circle - former Coinbase executive Brian Brooks. After taking office, he made a clear statement for the first time: Innovative digital asset companies are welcome to apply for federal banking licenses. Anchorage seized the opportunity and rushed in to submit an application as soon as possible, with dozens of documents and hundreds of pages of materials, covering KYC/AML, compliance, technical risk control, and management structure. On January 13, 2021, the OCC officially announced that the Anchorage Digital Bank National Association was officially launched - the first truly compliant digital asset national trust bank in the United States.
After becoming the first federally certified crypto custodian bank in U.S. history, Anchorage Digitals status has skyrocketed and it is regarded as a Wall Street-level institutional custodian service provider. It is the digital asset custodian of multiple asset management institutions and consortiums such as BlackRock and Cantor Fitzgerald.
Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last long. The policy direction changed suddenly. The OCC changed its personnel, the supervision was tightened, and new applications for digital asset trusts were basically “blocked” overnight. Anchorage became the only one left, and this track was “frozen” for more than three years.
Until now, when Trump came to power and the cryptocurrency-friendly faction came to power, Jonathan Gould, a cryptocurrency-friendly official in the Trump administration, was appointed as the interim head of the OCC and withdrew some of the banking guidelines for the crypto industry during the Biden era.
Earlier this month, Jonathan Gould, the newly appointed head of the OCC, was previously the chief legal officer of Bitfury, a blockchain infrastructure company. He is responsible for business, law, and regulation. His appointment made the market keenly aware that the federal compliance window has opened slightly again. Entrepreneurs, funds, and project parties in the industry have begun to move and wait for the release of a new round of licenses.
The ultimate game: access to the Federal Reserve clearing system
For the crypto community, just having a National Trust Bank License is not enough. What really makes everyone jealous is access to the Federal Reserve clearing system - that is, the legendary master account (Fed Master Account).
This is an even greater temptation for the crypto industry.
Directly settle, clear, transfer and deposit with the Federal Reserve without relying on third-party large banks. For crypto companies, as long as they obtain the master account qualification and place the stablecoin reserves directly in the central bank, it is equivalent to completely opening up the US financial infrastructure. They are no longer outsiders or second-class citizens, but regular troops that are truly endorsed by the US financial system.
Everyone in the industry understands that this is the true meaning of regularization, from being regarded as an outsider and a second-class citizen by the banking system to becoming a regular member of the US financial system. Therefore, Circle, Ripple, Anchorage, Paxos and other crypto stars are all working on obtaining federal trust bank licenses while struggling with master account approval.
However, the Federal Reserve is worried that the master account will be abused by crypto companies, which will bring financial stability risks (such as sudden large-scale liquidation of risky assets, affecting system liquidity), and there may also be regulatory challenges such as money laundering, illegal capital flows, and technical security. So far, no pure crypto company has been approved for a Fed master account. Even Anchorage, which was the first to take the lead, has obtained a federal trust bank license, but still has not been approved for a master account.
So who else is vying for a banking license?
Circle was the first to submit materials at the end of June 2025, intending to establish a new bank called First National Digital Currency Bank, NA, to directly custody USDC reserves and provide institutional-grade custody services.
Soon after, Ripple also officially announced in early July that it had submitted an application to the OCC, and at the same time applied for a federal master account, hoping to place the reserves of its own stablecoin RLUSD directly in the central bank system, a very radical stance.
The established custody company BitGo is also not willing to lag behind and is waiting for OCC approval. According to public information, BitGo is also one of the designated service providers for the “Trump USD1” reserve custody.
In addition to these three most representative crypto regulars, Wise (formerly TransferWise) has also submitted a license application for a non-deposit-taking custodial bank. New tech companies such as Erebor Bank have directly announced that they will include new economic industries such as AI, encryption, and defense in their service radius. The first-generation blockchain bank, First Blockchain Bank and Trust, tried it during the Biden era, but later quietly withdrew because the regulatory window was too tight. It is rumored that Fidelity Digital Assets also plans to submit materials, but the official has not confirmed it yet.
As long as Circle, Ripple, and BitGo can get this license, they can bypass state-level compliance, nationwide land grabbing, and even have the hope of connecting to the Federal Reserves main account. Once this is done, the US dollar reserves of stablecoins can be placed in the central banks treasury, and the custody and clearing capabilities can compete head-on with traditional Wall Street giants.
It seems that the regulators have always been looking forward to and wary of crypto companies wanting to become banks. On the one hand, with the personnel changes at the OCC and the warming of policies, crypto companies have indeed ushered in a window period; on the other hand, these licenses do not mean that they can do full-license banking business, and they still cannot accept demand deposits or make loans.
The new window has been opened, but the threshold has not been lowered. Who can be the first to knock on the door of the Federal Reserve? This will be the most exciting game between Wall Street bankers and crypto tycoons in the second half of the game. The winner can even rewrite the financial landscape of the next decade.
For the crypto industry, stablecoins have officially landed, banks have officially opened, and the originally parallel crypto world and Wall Street have finally merged under the sunshine of supervision. Crypto assets, which were once repeatedly controversial by regulators, banks, and capital markets, are now entering the daily accounts of every American and the balance sheets of every global financial institution as mainstream assets.
