The Independent Community Bankers of America has filed a suit seeking to stop the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency from continuing its recent charter spree. The trade group argues that the OCC's rule and an underlying interpretive letter are based on a bad reading of the law and should be repealed. The rule traces back to the first Trump administration, when Jonathan Gould, then the OCC's chief counsel and now the comptroller, wrote an interpretive letter that gave the agency a much wider berth to grant trust charters.
That letter became the basis for a rule the OCC finalized earlier this year. Thirteen of the 21 charters handed out in the second Trump administration have gone to crypto companies, which the ICBA argues do not meet the statutory safeguards required of a chartered bank. ICBA President and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey said digital assets held at a crypto firm operating under a national trust charter do not carry the federal protections consumers reasonably expect. The group wants the rule and interpretive letter vacated and asks specifically for one charter, given to crypto firm Protego, to be rescinded.
The dispute highlights a broader regulatory question about how to read the law when new business models blur old categories. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is separately working to bring prediction market sites Kalshi and Polymarket under its remit. The agency is trying to define these sites not by the kind of business they do, but by how they do it: gamblers bet with and against other gamblers rather than against the house, making the platforms more like derivatives markets than traditional casinos.
What remains unknown is whether the ICBA's suit will succeed in closing the charter pathway, and whether the CFTC's approach will hold. The ICBA does not appear to ask for other granted charters to be rescinded even though it argues all were violations of the law. If online gambling via a contract or derivatives-type platform falls under financial services regulation, other financial services firms may be tempted to offer it as a product, further blurring or erasing the line between gambling and investing.