The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Comptroller Jonathan Gould on Friday, asking a federal judge in Washington to throw out the rule the agency has used to grant national trust charters to crypto firms. The trade group, whose members typically hold less than $10 billion in assets, says those charters let digital-asset companies pick up the credibility of a federal bank without the deposit insurance, capital standards, or community-lending duties that apply to the banks it represents. Its complaint counts 21 trust banks approved or conditionally approved under the Trump administration, at least 13 of them crypto companies, including a trust company tied to President Donald Trump’s family and a conditional charter for crypto exchange giant Coinbase.

The case brought by the ICBA is an Administrative Procedure Act challenge to two agency actions and one specific charter approval. Interpretive Letter 1176, issued during the last days of the first Trump administration, told the industry that the OCC could charter a firm as a national bank if it engaged in “the operations of a trust company and activities related thereto,” even if it did not take deposits. A final rule implementing that reading was eventually published on March 2nd.

The ICBA says that the 1978 National Bank Act amendment Gould’s agency is leaning on did not create a path for non-fiduciary crypto companies to gain bank charters. According to the ICBA’s complaint, the OCC had never tried to charter a national bank that neither took deposits nor acted as a fiduciary until the Trump administration went looking for a way to bring cryptocurrency into the national system.

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