Bastion has moved a step closer to becoming a federally chartered institution. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has given the firm preliminary conditional approval to operate as a national trust bank, a decision Bastion announced in a news release on Friday.
If the process is completed, the entity will be called Bastion Platforms National Trust Company. Before it can open for business, the company has to purchase stock in a Federal Reserve bank and satisfy every other condition the regulator has attached.
The structure is narrower than that of a traditional lender. Under the OCC’s terms, the trust company will be barred from taking deposits and from issuing loans, and its customers will not have Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) coverage. Its role is confined to services tied to digital dollars.
Those services include issuing stablecoins under another company’s brand, running fiduciary custodial wallets, and swapping traditional currency for USDC on behalf of custody clients. The bank would also support other regulated stablecoin issuers. Bastion says businesses will be able to reach all of these products through one federally regulated counterparty instead of stitching together several providers.
Bastion does not issue a stablecoin of its own. Sony Bank is among its partners, and Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures are among its financial backers.
The charter would layer federal oversight from the OCC on top of the state licenses Bastion already holds. The company has been working toward that goal since February 2025, when it obtained its New York trust charter.
Chief Executive Nassim Eddequiouaq framed the approval as a sign of how the sector has matured. “Stablecoins have moved from emerging technology into core financial infrastructure, and that requires a different standard of trust, governance and regulatory rigor,” said Nassim Eddequiouaq, CEO of Bastion.
