The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday, Oct. 2, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The trade group says the OCC has stretched its power to charter national trust banks far past what the National Bank Act allows, and that crypto firms have been the main beneficiaries.
The case is brought under the Administrative Procedure Act. It targets two documents: the OCC’s final chartering rule, issued March 2, 2026, and Interpretive Letter 1176, the earlier letter the rule codifies. ICBA argues the OCC has no authority to charter banks that are neither depository nor fiduciary, that the rule is arbitrary and capricious because the agency did not meaningfully answer comments about its risks, and that the letter should have gone through public notice and comment in the first place.
The relief asked for is specific. ICBA wants the court to vacate the rule and IL 1176, to vacate Protego’s conditional national trust-bank approval, and to bar the OCC from relying on either document to approve future charters. Protego is the only charter the complaint asks the court to cancel outright.
The numbers in the filing frame the fight. According to the complaint, the OCC has approved, conditionally or otherwise, 21 national trust banks during the current administration, and at least 13 of them are crypto companies. ICBA says those firms get the credibility of a federal charter without the obligations community banks carry on capital, liquidity, supervision and FDIC insurance, and that the gap puts small banks at a competitive disadvantage. The complaint also warns that the OCC’s receivership framework for uninsured institutions is untested at the scale some crypto applicants propose.
Scope matters here. The December 2025 conditional approvals, including Ripple National Trust Bank and Circle’s First National Digital Currency Bank, are not directly challenged in the suit. They could still be affected if a court threw out the rule and the letter behind the charter path, but the complaint does not ask the court to cancel them by name.
A lawsuit is not a revocation. No existing charter or conditional approval has been revoked or paused. The OCC told reporters it does not comment on litigation. The next steps are procedural: the agency’s response to the complaint and any scheduling order from the court.
The GENIUS Act sits in the background. The stablecoin law made a national trust charter more valuable, because it gives a federal route to become a qualified payment stablecoin issuer, while state-qualified issuers are capped at $10 billion in outstanding stablecoins. ICBA also points to the law in its argument, saying that by legislating on stablecoins, Congress kept the broader question of crypto banking for itself.
What happened: the largest community-bank trade group asked a federal judge to shut the trust-charter path crypto firms have been using. What has not happened: any ruling, or any change to an existing charter.
Sources: ICBA complaint; ICBA release; CoinDesk; American Banker; OCC