In brief
- The OCC granted OpenReserve Bank preliminary conditional approval on September 2 to charter a national bank in Salt Lake City, Utah, just under five months after the company filed its application.
- OpenReserve must raise at least $210 million in initial paid-in capital and hold a 12% Tier 1 leverage ratio for three years before it can open.
- OpenReserve plans a separate subsidiary to issue and custody dollar-backed stablecoins, though that application hasn't been filed with the OCC yet.
OpenReserve Bank, backed by Andreessen Horowitz among other VC heavyweights, received preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on September 2 to charter a full-service national bank in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The decision letter closes out a review of just under five months, since OpenReserve filed its application on April 13.
OpenReserve Bank is a blockchain-native fintech startup backed by a $25 million seed round led by a16z crypto, with Coinbase Ventures, Jump Capital, and Wintermute Ventures among the other investors. It's essentially pitching itself as an "always-on" bank—continuous, blockchain-based settlement instead of the batch-processing rails (ACH, wire transfers) that traditional banks run on.
The approval comes with specific numbers attached. OpenReserve must raise at least $210 million in initial paid-in capital, net of organizational costs, and maintain a Tier 1 leverage ratio of at least 12% through its first three years of operation. Miss either deadline—12 months to raise the capital, 18 months to open—and the approval expires.
Diwakar Choubey, who co-founded OpenReserve with Richard Correia after running MoneyLion, framed the harder full-service charter path, as opposed to the national trust charter most “crypto banks” have gone with, as deliberate.
"We chose the national bank path deliberately," he said in a statement announcing the approval.
That path separates OpenReserve from most of its crypto-charter peers. Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, Paxos, and BitGo all went the national trust charters route, which permits custody and fiduciary work but blocks deposit-taking and lending. A full national bank charter lets OpenReserve do both once it clears final approval.
OpenReserve's business plan centers on tokenized deposits, treasury management, foreign correspondent banking, and what it calls a banking-as-a-service platform for institutional clients. It also intends to spin up a separate, wholly owned subsidiary to issue and redeem U.S. dollar-denominated, reserve-backed stablecoins. That subsidiary hasn't filed its own OCC application yet, and any stablecoin activity will have to comply with the GENIUS Act—the U.S. federal law governing stablecoin operations that went into effect in July last year.
OpenReserve wasn't the only recipient of such a charter this week. The OCC also granted British fintech Revolut preliminary conditional approval for a national bank based in Connecticut, part of what Comptroller Jonathan Gould has cast as a push to bring firms working on novel technology into the federally supervised banking system.
The pace hasn't gone unchallenged. Sen. Elizabeth Warren argued in May that a string of OCC crypto trust-bank approvals violated the National Bank Act, writing that the firms "look like crypto banks, not trust companies." The OCC approved a national trust charter for the Trump-linked World Liberty stablecoin venture that August anyway.
OpenReserve now has until September 2027 to raise the $210 million and until March 2028 to open for business—miss either mark, and the preliminary approval expire