The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave preliminary conditional approval on Friday to World Liberty Trust Company, National Association, clearing it to operate as a national trust bank. It is the first such charter the federal regulator has extended to a venture tied to President Donald Trump’s family.
The Aug. 14 approval, confirmed independently by The Block and CoinDesk, is preliminary. The OCC retains the power to rescind it. The trust company cannot open for business until final approval arrives. A national trust charter, once finalized, would let the firm offer federally supervised crypto-asset custody and act as a qualified custodian. Until now, that status has belonged almost exclusively to state-level trusts and a handful of federally chartered peers.
The OCC’s letter said the agency grants “preliminary conditional approval of your charter application upon determining that your proposal meets certain regulatory and policy requirements.” Neither report enumerated the specific conditions. The letter, linked by The Block, had not been independently parsed at press time.
World Liberty Financial launched in 2024 with Donald Trump and his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as backers. Earlier in January the firm spun up the trust company subsidiary for one purpose: to pursue an OCC license covering stablecoin issuance and redemption, fiat on- and off-ramps, custody, and asset conversion, The Block reported. If the charter holds, a Trump-linked firm will sit inside the same federal perimeter that supervises bank custody of customer assets.
WLF issues USD1, a stablecoin carrying a roughly $4 billion market cap. That makes it the fourth-largest after Tether and USDC, per The Block’s figures. Whether the trust bank would custody USD1 directly is not spelled out in the approval letter’s reported scope. Neither report quantifies WLF’s assets under custody or its customer base.
The approval arrives as the OCC pivots under Acting Comptroller Jonathan Gould. Gould, previously chief legal officer at bitcoin mining firm Bitfury, has said entities engaging in crypto should “have a pathway to become federally supervised banks.” Conditional approvals have gone to Coinbase, Paxos, BitGo, Ripple, and Circle over the past year. The WLF nod stands apart: it is the first to a firm with direct financial ties to a sitting president.
That distinction drives the controversy. Financial disclosures released in June showed Trump received millions of dollars connected to World Liberty Financial, The Block reported separately. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Gould in January demanding he halt the OCC’s review of the WLF application until Trump divests from the venture and addresses conflicts of interest.
Warren wrote that approving the charter would put the OCC in the position of promulgating “rules that influence the profitability of the President’s company” while being “responsible for directly supervising and enforcing the law against the President’s company — and its competitors.” The OCC did not address those concerns in the approval notice. Neither report indicates whether the conditions attached to Friday’s approval speak to the conflict-of-interest questions Warren raised.
WLF co-founder Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff, posted on X after the news. The firm, he wrote, would 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.” Co-founder Chase Zao was named in CoinDesk’s reporting. The Block spells the Witkoff first name as “Zack”; CoinDesk uses “Zach.”
Neither source carries a direct on-record statement from the OCC beyond the letter’s language. The path from preliminary conditional approval to a final charter, and how long it might take, goes unstated in either report. What the conditions require of World Liberty before it can open its doors remains the unanswered question. For Warren’s office, it is likely the next one.
