Block, the Fortune 500 payments company led by Jack Dorsey, has filed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to launch Builders Bank & Trust, a national trust bank designed to custody Bitcoin and stablecoins. The filing was reported by CoinMarketCap on September 9, 2026. The proposed entity would be uninsured, meaning holdings would not carry federal deposit insurance.
The move lands while Bitcoin trades at $79,173, up 0.6% over 24 hours as of September 9, 2026, with the broader market sitting in "Greed" territory on the Fear & Greed index. Price is not the story here. The story is a large public payments company seeking a federal charter to hold crypto assets itself, rather than routing that function through a third party.
A trust bank charter, not a checking account
A national trust bank is a specific kind of institution. It holds and safeguards assets on behalf of clients rather than taking deposits and making loans the way a retail bank does. Applying to the OCC for that charter puts the custody function under a federal banking regulator instead of a patchwork of state money-transmitter licenses.
The word "uninsured" in the filing matters. Deposit insurance from the FDIC covers cash deposits at member banks up to a set limit. It does not cover crypto assets, and a trust bank holding Bitcoin or stablecoins for clients is not offering an insured deposit product. Anyone reading this as a government-backed guarantee on their coins would be reading it wrong. The federal charter governs how the institution operates and is supervised. It does not put a safety net under the value of what it holds.
Custody is the layer under everything else
Custody sits beneath almost every crypto product a normal person touches. Exchanges custody balances. Card issuers custody the stablecoins or tokens that fund spending. When you use a self-custody card that spends from your own wallet, you are opting out of that arrangement entirely, which is the whole point of the design. A federally chartered custody bank changes the counterparty math for the institutions that do rely on a third party to hold assets.
For a company Block's size, owning the custody layer removes a dependency. Block already runs Cash App and the Square merchant network, and it holds Bitcoin on its own balance sheet. A regulated in-house custody entity would let it hold client crypto under federal supervision rather than leaning on an outside custodian with its own risk profile.
The charter race is getting crowded
Block's application is not happening in isolation. Fintechs have been lining up at the OCC. Revolut recently won a conditional OCC bank charter in the US, and a blockchain-native applicant secured initial approval to operate as a bank earlier this year. On the same day as Block's filing, CoinMarketCap noted the pattern of firms seeking national charters to bring crypto custody and stablecoin activity inside the federal banking perimeter.
A charter is a filing, not an approval. The OCC reviews applications on capital, governance, risk controls, and business plan, and the process can run months with conditions attached or outright denial. Block has stated an intention and started the clock. It has not been granted anything yet.
A structural signal, not a price catalyst
Treat this as a structural signal, not a price catalyst. A company with Block's revenue base and public reporting obligations does not file for a federal trust charter as a marketing exercise. It does so because it wants crypto custody to be a supervised, permanent part of its operation. That is a different posture from the trading-desk era of crypto, when the priority was moving volume rather than building durable infrastructure.
The near-term effect on holders is small. The longer-term effect, if the charter clears, is that stablecoin and Bitcoin custody moves further into regulated territory, which tends to matter for the institutions and eventually the retail products built on top. If you are choosing where your assets sit, the reminder stands: a federal charter governs conduct and supervision, not the market value of the coins, and it is not deposit insurance.
Overview
Block filed with the OCC to launch Builders Bank & Trust, an uninsured national trust bank built to custody Bitcoin and stablecoins, per a CoinMarketCap report on September 9, 2026. The charter would place crypto custody under federal supervision, but "uninsured" means no FDIC backstop on holdings. It joins a growing line of fintechs seeking OCC charters. The filing starts a review process that can take months and carries no guarantee of approval. Bitcoin traded at $79,173 (+0.6% on the day) as the news broke.
