JACK DORSEY'S BLOCK APPLIED TO BECOME A NATIONAL TRUST BANK FOR BITCOIN CUSTODY — SIX OTHER CRYPTO FIRMS ARE IN THE SAME QUEUE — THE OCC HAS DECIDED 23 OF THESE APPLICATIONS AND SAID YES TO 21

On September 8 Block filed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to charter an uninsured national trust bank called Builders Bank & Trust, N.A. Its business would be custody and other fiduciary services, for bitcoin and for stablecoins.

Block is Jack Dorsey's company. Square, Cash App, Bitkey, Proto mining hardware. This is the firm that ships a self-custody wallet applying for a federal charter to hold coins on your behalf.

It is not alone and that is the story. Coinbase, Paxos, BitGo, Ripple, Circle and Revolut all have applications in front of the same regulator. World Liberty Financial already has conditional approval. Since 2025 the OCC has taken in 40 of these applications, approved 21 and denied two.

Run that. 21 and 2 means 23 decided, and 21 of 23 is 91%. Seventeen are still sitting there. The agency that spent a decade being described as the wall between crypto and the banking system is currently saying yes to about nine out of every ten applications it rules on.

So the question is not whether crypto gets into the banking system. That is settled and the paperwork is being processed. The question is what you do about it, and it is a genuinely open one. A chartered custodian is audited, examined and accountable in ways an offshore exchange is not, and for an institution with a board and a fiduciary duty that is the only door there is. This is real progress and pretending otherwise is silly.

But look at what the word custody means. It means somebody else has the keys. This week a federation holding bitcoin for other people lost nearly 4,000 coins and is currently negotiating with the man who took them. A charter would not have stopped that. A charter is a promise about who is liable afterwards, not a promise that it will not happen.

Twelve words, and they are not ours: not your keys, not your coins. Seven of the largest names in this industry are standing in line for permission to hold yours. If that is the right trade for you, take it with your eyes open. The alternative is a device on your desk and nobody's permission at all.