# OCC The **Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)** is the federal regulator that charters, regulates, and supervises all **national banks** and federal savings associations, plus the federal branches of foreign banks. It is a bureau of the [[Department of the Treasury]] but operates with substantial independence, funded by assessments on the banks it supervises rather than by congressional appropriation. Created by the National Currency Act of 1863 to establish a national banking system and a uniform national currency during the Civil War, it is one of the oldest financial regulators in the federal government and the senior partner of the three federal banking agencies (alongside the [[Federal Reserve]] and [[FDIC]]) for institutions that hold a national charter. The OCC's core powers are the charter and the examination: it decides who may operate a national bank, sets capital and risk standards, conducts on-site supervision, and can issue cease-and-desist orders, civil money penalties, and removal orders against bank officers. Because a national charter can preempt state banking law, the *choice* of which regulator a bank answers to — the OCC, a state regulator, or the Fed for holding companies — is itself a contested lever; "charter shopping" toward the most permissive supervisor is a recurring feature of the [[The Banking System]]. For the KB, the contemporary OCC is a **deregulation-and-crypto** story. The agency is led by **[[Jonathan Gould]]**, sworn in as the 32nd Comptroller in July 2025, a former Bitfury chief legal officer whose tenure has reoriented the office toward accommodating digital assets. Under the [[GENIUS Act]], the OCC in 2026 proposed a comprehensive federal supervisory framework for payment **[[Stablecoin]]** issuers, positioning itself as the chartering authority for a new class of crypto-adjacent institutions — the regulatory counterpart to the broader crypto-friendly turn at the [[SEC]] and [[CFTC]]. The same posture that frames this as "modernization" frames the risk in KB terms: lighter-touch bank supervision, the folding of crypto into the federally-insured banking perimeter, and the perennial pull of [[Regulatory Capture]] when the supervisor is funded by — and recruited from — the industry it polices. ## The charter wave (2025–2026) Under Gould the OCC received about 40 de novo charter applications in 18 months and has conditionally approved at least 25 for crypto, stablecoin and fintech companies, among them [[Erebor]] (the Luckey/Lonsdale bank) and World Liberty Trust (the Trump family's [[World Liberty Financial]]). It has denied two (Wise, bunq) and returned one. The community bankers' association (ICBA) sued the agency on October 2, 2026 over the rule that makes most of these trust charters possible. Full ledger and analysis: [[OCC Charter Wave]]. ## See Also - [[OCC Charter Wave]] - [[The Banking System]] - [[Financial Regulation]] - [[Federal Reserve]] - [[FDIC]] - [[Department of the Treasury]] - [[Financial System Hub]] - [[Federal Agencies]]