NEW YORK — For the tens of millions of Americans who have kept their money in fintech apps rather than federally supervised banks, last week changed the math.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted conditional preliminary approval to two blockchain-adjacent institutions in a single week: Revolut Bank US, National Association, headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, and OpenReserve Bank, National Association, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. The OCC issued both decisions on September 3, 2026, hours apart. Together, they represent the broadest formal opening of the federally supervised banking system to crypto-native and blockchain-first businesses that the agency has announced in a decade.
Neither bank is open. Both face significant prerequisites before the first dollar in deposits arrives. But for an industry that spent years arguing it deserved a seat at the regulated table, the OCC just cleared two chairs.
Revolut is the better-known of the two. The London-headquartered fintech, valued at roughly $45 billion in its 2024 funding round and with 50 million customers across Europe, has operated in the United States since 2020 through partner banks. That arrangement, standard for neobanks without their own charters, means Revolut could offer its US users a debit card and currency exchange but could not hold their deposits on its own balance sheet or guarantee them federal insurance. A national charter ends that dependency.
Under the OCC’s conditional approval, Revolut must raise $95 million in organizational capital before the bank can be formally constituted, maintain a tier one leverage ratio of at least ten percent through its first three years of operation, and obtain deposit insurance from the FDIC and a separate approval from the Federal Reserve. The OCC withheld authorization for four of Revolut’s intended services: retail foreign exchange, FX forward contracts, merchant acquiring, and foreign correspondent banking. Each requires a separate supervisory sign-off before it can launch. Revolut is targeting a 2027 opening.
Revolut has been pursuing US regulatory standing since 2021, when it applied for a California state banking license before abandoning that application two years later. The UK FCA stablecoin rules that the Financial Conduct Authority finalized in July 2026 gave Revolut a relatively stable home jurisdiction, but a US federal charter has been a separate and harder question.
The OCC’s conditional approval for OpenReserve carries a steeper capital requirement: $210 million, roughly twice Revolut’s threshold, reflecting the institutional scale and stablecoin infrastructure the firm intends to operate. OpenReserve raised a $25 million seed round in April, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, with participation from Jump Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Acrew, and Clocktower. That round funded the organizational phase. The $210 million must arrive separately within twelve months, and banking operations must begin within eighteen, or the conditional approval lapses.
The back-to-back decisions reflect a deliberate policy shift at the OCC under Comptroller Jonathan Gould. Previous OCC administrations approved a handful of crypto-adjacent trust charters, but trust charters carry no deposit insurance and no access to Federal Reserve payment systems. A full national bank charter brings an institution inside the core US banking infrastructure, with all the supervisory responsibilities and federal protections that accompany it, according to Revolut’s OCC approval document and OpenReserve’s approval document.
The speed of OpenReserve’s preliminary approval drew industry attention. The startup submitted its application in April 2026 and cleared the conditional approval stage in under five months. Revolut filed its first US bank charter application in 2021 and spent three years navigating a state process before abandoning it.
Whether the FDIC and Federal Reserve approve Revolut and OpenReserve as quickly as the OCC has remains unknown. Deposit insurance decisions sit with the FDIC Board, which operates independently of the OCC, and Federal Reserve membership adds a third layer of supervisory review. Neither agency has announced a timeline for either application.
What neither OCC decision addresses is how the existing capital adequacy framework applies to institutions whose core settlement infrastructure sits on a blockchain. Both Revolut and OpenReserve will generate the first real regulatory data on how that works inside a federally supervised institution.
The approvals land during a broader realignment in crypto regulation. The GENIUS Act established a federal framework for dollar-backed stablecoins and designated OCC-supervised national banks as eligible issuers. In July, the US and UK released a US-UK tokenized finance roadmap establishing common principles for stablecoin regulation, creating the architecture for Revolut to operate a US national bank under aligned rules on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether regulators honor that framework in practice remains a condition yet to be fulfilled.
The OCC, in clearing two blockchain-adjacent institutions in a single week, has moved a boundary that held for years. The gap between that moment and the one where either bank can open a deposit account now runs through the FDIC and the Federal Reserve.
