A federal bank charter for the president's own crypto firm

World Liberty Financial applied on January 5, 2026 for a national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The decision belongs to Comptroller Jonathan Gould - Trump's appointee, formerly OCC chief counsel in his first term - who has granted roughly a dozen crypto charters, cut target approval times from up to two years to 120 days, slashed OCC staff by more than a quarter, and rewritten charter criteria to be crypto-friendly. Two former OCC staffers told NOTUS approval is all but certain; one called denial 'inconceivable.'

The charter is not cosmetic: it would let the president's firm settle transactions like a payments company (with the family taking a cut), issue USD1 directly to the public without its current intermediary BitGo, and preempt state regulation including liquidity requirements - all while giving US companies, as NOTUS put it, 'a new route to steer money to the president,' since firms have an incentive to settle deals in the president's coin. 'For the first time in history, a president is leaning on a bank regulator to give his private enterprise the implicit backing of the federal government,' said the Consumer Federation of America's Corey Frayer.

The application sits atop the firm's accumulated conflicts: the pardoned CZ's Binance holding ~87% of USD1, the secretly Tahnoun-owned 49%, the Pakistan tie-up, and Warren's warning about USD1 transactions with North Korea-linked PancakeSwap. Pressed by Sen. Van Hollen in February, Gould answered: 'If you're suggesting the president would do anything inappropriate or illegal, then I reject that assertion' - and has called Democratic scrutiny 'the only political pressure I've felt from anyone.'

Documented (application; OCC preliminary conditional approval, Corporate Decision #1385)

Legal but conflicted; unprecedented per former regulators; congressional scrutiny (Warren, Van Hollen)

Charter would let WLF settle transactions with a family cut, issue USD1 directly (bypassing BitGo), and preempt state liquidity rules; Binance holds ~87% of USD1 float

Application filed 2026-01-05; OCC preliminary conditional approval 2026-08-14