Ripple has received final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to open a national trust bank. The company confirmed the sign-off in a release dated Monday, roughly a year after Ripple National Trust Bank first cleared the conditional stage. The charter gives Ripple a regulated vehicle to hold the reserves behind its Ripple USD stablecoin and, eventually, to offer custody services to enterprises.
What the charter actually covers
RNTB will manage the dollar deposits, US government securities, and cash equivalents that back RLUSD, acting as trustee over those reserves for token holders. That's the core of the mandate. The bank can also offer fiduciary digital asset custody once it's operational, and law firm Davis Wright Tremaine notes that trust banks of this kind may in some cases qualify as custodians for institutional clients.
What the charter doesn't do is hand XRP a role. The approval is tied to RLUSD's reserve structure and custody capabilities, not to Ripple's native token. CEO Brad Garlinghouse framed the charter as a stronger foundation for RLUSD and for institutional products across payments, custody, and capital markets — a description that leans on the stablecoin and the custody business rather than XRP itself.
Ripple joins a short list
The company now sits alongside Circle, BitGo, and Fidelity Digital Assets in holding approvals of this type. Circle secured its final approval in July, according to journalist Eleanor Terrett. That puts Ripple in a relatively small club of crypto firms with a federally recognized trust charter, which matters for institutional counterparties who care about who's holding the assets.
The RLUSD-XRP gap
The numbers tell a lopsided story. RLUSD supply climbed from near $1.38 billion in January to about $2.57 billion now, per DefiLlama — an 86% increase. Over that same stretch, XRP fell from roughly $2.08 to $1.31, a 37% drop. The stablecoin has been growing while the token that shares its corporate parent has been sliding.
The charter doesn't change that math on its own. About 61% of RLUSD supply circulates on Ethereum and 39% on the XRP Ledger. Ethereum transfers pay ETH fees and add nothing to XRP burns, while XRPL fees are too small to meaningfully affect supply anyway. So even as RLUSD expands, the XRP Ledger isn't capturing much of the economic activity.
There's a path where that shifts. If RNTB's custody arm takes on institutional XRP holdings, or if RLUSD issuance gravitates toward the XRPL, XRP holders would have a more direct line to the charter's benefits. Neither is guaranteed by the approval itself. For now, the OCC sign-off is a stablecoin and custody story, and the XRP angle remains a maybe.
What's next is operational: RNTB has to open and begin taking on the trustee role for RLUSD reserves. The OCC approval is the gate, not the finish line.
