Stripe applies to establish 'Bridge National Trust Bank' to issue stablecoins

Global payments company Stripe has applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a federal trust bank for the issuance and management of stablecoins, and federal charter competition is intensifying.

According to Decrypt on the 15th (local time), Bridge, Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure subsidiary, submitted an application to the OCC to establish the 'Bridge National Trust Bank'. Zack Abrams, co-founder, said, "This application is intended to operate under a unified federal regulatory framework consistent with the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act)."

If authorized, Bridge would be able to issue, redeem, and custody stablecoins under federal supervision without obtaining state-level money transmitter licenses. Abrams said, "This infrastructure buildout will make it possible to tokenize assets on the scale of trillions of dollars."

Stripe acquired Bridge in October last year for about $1.1 billion and is pursuing a strategy to integrate it into its global payments network as a blockchain-based payment system.

This application comes after the implementation of the GENIUS Act passed in July, which introduced a new charter system for 'permitted payment stablecoin issuers'. Under the bill, stablecoin issuers must meet requirements such as 100 percent backing in cash or U.S. Treasury securities, monthly financial disclosures, and guaranteeing token holders' priority redemption rights.

Major issuers have already joined this federal charter competition. Circle applied in July for a federal trust license to manage USDC reserves under OCC supervision, and Ripple and Paxos are also undergoing federal charter processes. Earlier this month, Coinbase also applied for a 'National Trust Company' charter.

If Bridge is authorized, it is expected to become one of the first federal trust banks in the U.S. specialized in stablecoins. A representative from DeFi aggregator 'Astros' said, "This is a turning point in which the U.S. finally recognizes digital dollar infrastructure at the federal level," and added, "It will be an important case for establishing interoperability between on-chain liquidity and off-chain supervision."

He added, "Bridge's move is more of a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the state-level charter models of incumbents like Circle and Paxos," and said, "It will lay the foundation for building a layered system in which regulators and decentralized protocols can coexist."