Jack Dorsey’s Block Applies for Bank Charter to Custody Bitcoin

Block has applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust bank charter, the payments company behind Square and Cash App said on Tuesday.

Builders Bank & Trust would be uninsured and non-depository, taking no deposits and making no loans. Its business would be custody of Bitcoin and other digital assets, executing customer buy and sell orders on a riskless principal basis, and stablecoin settlement.

Block has run digital asset services for about eight years under more than 50 state money transmitter and virtual currency licenses, the application says, handling around $10.7 billion in Bitcoin transaction volume in 2025 and serving about two million monthly crypto users through Cash App by the second quarter. A federal charter, Block says, would let it support those activities “through a consistent national framework as the business scales.”

A bank with no branches

Builders Bank would be headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with no branches. All five proposed directors live elsewhere, and Block has asked the OCC to waive the rule requiring one to live within 100 miles. Lee Woolley, Block’s digital asset strategy lead and a former Northern Trust and BNY Mellon executive, would chair it and serve as chief executive.

Dorsey himself is not among the organizers, directors or senior executives, and appears in the filing only as Block’s co-founder. The business plan and capital figures went in as confidential exhibits, and the bank cannot open unless the OCC approves.

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The stablecoin element sits uneasily with Dorsey, who has said he does not much like stablecoins and would rather build on Bitcoin.

The OCC conditionally approved five crypto trust charters last December, covering Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos, then three more in February including Crypto.com and Stripe subsidiary Bridge. Coinbase won preliminary approval in April, and applications from Morgan Stanley, Payoneer, Zerohash, Kraken’s Payward and the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial sit on the agency’s pending list.

Approval is not automatic. The OCC denied Wise National Trust in July. In April it amended its chartering rule to cover “operations of a trust company and activities related thereto” instead of “fiduciary activities,” the wording Block’s application leans on. The agency says the change neither expands nor contracts its authority.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has argued that the OCC lacks authority to grant trust charters to firms that do not perform traditional fiduciary work, a reading the industry disputes.