Block Seeks US Bank Charter for Bitcoin Custody

Block, Jack Dorsey's fintech company, has applied to federal regulators to establish Builders Bank & Trust, N.A., a proposed national trust bank that would custody Bitcoin and stablecoins under direct federal oversight. The application, filed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, puts Block in a growing queue of crypto firms racing to lock in federal regulatory standing before the digital asset custody market fully consolidates around a handful of OCC-chartered players.

What Is Block's Builders Bank & Trust?

Builders Bank & Trust, N.A. would be an uninsured national trust bank, meaning it holds assets in custody and performs fiduciary functions, but does not accept customer deposits or issue loans. That distinction matters. This isn't Block trying to become Chase. It's Block trying to become the regulated vault where institutions store Bitcoin and stablecoins.

The charter, if granted by the OCC, would give Block a single national regulatory framework instead of navigating a patchwork of state licensing requirements. That uniformity is the point, it's the difference between a company running compliance across 50 different regulatory environments and one operating under a single federal umbrella.

Block already has US banking exposure through Square Financial Services, an industrial bank it got licensed in 2021. Builders Bank would be separate, purpose-built for digital asset custody and trust activities. Different entity, different mandate.

Who Runs the New Bank, and Why That Resume Is Interesting

Lee Woolley, currently Block's Digital Asset Strategy Lead, is expected to serve as Builders Bank's president and CEO. Woolley brings more than 20 years of traditional finance experience, he worked at the Treasury Department Federal Credit Union, Northern Trust, and BNY Mellon. That's a deeply establishment resume for a company that built its identity around disrupting the establishment.

Call it pragmatism, call it surrender, either way, Block is staffing its new bank with exactly the kind of institutional pedigree it once positioned itself as an alternative to. Woolley isn't a crypto-native. He's a banker. And that's probably the point.

The Block Builders Bank application follows a now-familiar playbook in the industry: hire a regulatory veteran with credible institutional history, file a clean application, and let the OCC process do the work.

The OCC's Digital Asset Licensing Queue Is Getting Crowded

Block is far from alone in this queue. The OCC national trust bank licensing pipeline has become the central battleground in crypto's regulatory future, with Ripple, Circle, Paxos, BitGo, and Fidelity Digital Assets all receiving conditional approvals in late 2025. Circle later moved beyond conditional status to receive full, final authorization to form a federally regulated national trust bank.

That progression, from conditional to final, is what Block is ultimately chasing. Conditional approval is not authorization to operate. The OCC can ask for more information, impose governance conditions, set capital requirements, or reject the application outright. Builders Bank cannot open until the OCC clears every box.

The review process involves financial, supervisory, and legal analysis. For digital asset applicants, a federal charter subjects approved trust activities to a single national framework, but it does not convert a non-deposit-taking trust company into a retail bank, and it does not confer deposit insurance. These are custody vaults. Not savings accounts.

For a company like Block, which operates across all 50 states through Cash App and Square, a fragmented web of state money transmission licenses is expensive to maintain. A single federal trust charter would dramatically simplify that compliance overhead, and it would place Block in the same regulatory tier as Circle and Fidelity, making it far easier to win institutional custody mandates that currently flow toward OCC-chartered competitors.

What Does This Mean for Dorsey's Bitcoin Bet?

There's an obvious tension here worth naming. Dorsey built his public persona in crypto around Bitcoin maximalism, the idea that sovereign, self-custodied Bitcoin is an antidote to a broken financial system. He bashed Libra publicly. He pivoted Block's hardware strategy toward Bitcoin mining. He called fiat currency broken on multiple occasions.

Now his company is building a federally chartered bank.

Block's Square Financial Services, licensed in 2021, already showed what regulatory standing does for a fintech's deal pipeline. Builders Bank applies that same logic to the custody layer. Own the regulated rails instead of renting them.

The cynical read: this is a business decision, full stop. Institutional clients won't park assets with an unregulated custodian when OCC-chartered alternatives exist. Block either secures its federal standing or loses the custody market to Circle and Fidelity. That's the real math here, not Bitcoin ideology.

The optimistic read: having a Bitcoin-focused trust bank operating under federal oversight is actually good for the asset class. Regulated custody infrastructure is what pushes pension funds and sovereign wealth allocators over the threshold. Dorsey's bank, if approved, becomes part of the plumbing that channels institutional capital into Bitcoin exposure.

Dorsey says he's still a Bitcoin maximalist. His regulatory filings say he also wants to be a federally chartered banker.