# Jonathan Gould **Jonathan V. Gould** is the 32nd Comptroller of the Currency, head of the [[OCC]], the federal regulator that charters and supervises national banks. He was confirmed **50–45 on July 10, 2025** and sworn in July 15 for a five-year term. He came to the job from a crypto company, as acting comptroller Brian Brooks (ex-Coinbase) had in 2020, and his tenure has become the regulatory gateway through which crypto and fintech firms, including the Trump family's, are entering the banking system. ## Career Gould served at the OCC once before, as **senior deputy comptroller and chief counsel from 2018 to 2021** in the first Trump administration. In that role he issued **Interpretive Letter 1176** (January 11, 2021), which set out how national trust banks could operate. He was a partner at the law firm Jones Day and then **chief legal officer of Bitfury**, a blockchain-infrastructure and bitcoin-mining company, before Trump nominated him to return as comptroller. Sen. [[Cynthia Lummis]], the Senate's leading crypto advocate, voted against him on a procedural vote over stablecoin and state-preemption questions, then voted to confirm. ## Running the OCC Two themes define his tenure: - **Opening banking to crypto.** Gould inherited the March 2025 decision, made under acting comptroller Rodney Hood, to drop "reputation risk" from the OCC's supervisory handbooks, a change aimed at the [[Debanking]] complaints of crypto firms and conservatives, and built on it. The OCC confirmed that national banks may buy and sell crypto assets for customers, and it proposed a federal framework for payment [[Stablecoin]] issuers under the [[GENIUS Act]]. - **The charter wave.** He has granted at least 25 conditional charter approvals to crypto and fintech companies (see [[OCC Charter Wave]]). The first de novo approval of his tenure went to [[Erebor]], the bank backed by [[Palmer Luckey]] and [[Joe Lonsdale]], on October 15, 2025: "Erebor is the first de novo bank to receive a preliminary conditional approval since I arrived at the OCC." Erebor's fundraising memo cited a co-founder's "unique" connections to Gould. ## World Liberty Trust On **August 14, 2026** the OCC conditionally approved a national trust charter for World Liberty Trust Company, the bank arm of the Trump family's [[World Liberty Financial]]. It plans to take over issuance and custody of the [[USD1]] stablecoin from [[BitGo]]. The conditions: at least $20M in Tier 1 capital, no deposit-taking, no dealing in WLF's own tokens, and "passivity commitments" from [[Eric Trump]], [[Zak Folkman]] and an Emirati investor that they would not seek board seats or influence the bank. Gould had advertised a 120-day review timeline; this one took 221 days. Gould had declined [[Elizabeth Warren]]'s January 2026 request to pause the review until the president divested. The approval followed the OCC's recent denials of charters to the payments firms Wise and Bunq, a contrast critics such as Americans for Financial Reform cite. Community bankers' October 2026 lawsuit challenges both his 2021 interpretive letter and his trust-bank rule. ## See Also - [[OCC]] · [[OCC Charter Wave]] · [[Erebor]] · [[World Liberty Financial]] · [[USD1]] - [[Financial Regulation]] · [[Financial System Hub]] · [[Trump Crypto Ventures]]