The Trump administration conditionally approved a charter that would allow his family’s crypto venture to act like a bank, in an unprecedented arrangement that will enable the president’s family to pocket interest earned from corporate transactions.
World Liberty Financial, the stablecoin and trading platform co-founded by President Donald Trump and his three sons, was conditionally approved for a national trust bank charter on Friday. The move allows the cryptocurrency company to issue its dollar-backed stablecoin USD1 to institutional clients, convert other stablecoins to its own digital token and operate as a fiduciary for digital assets, according to a letter written by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent Treasury Department bureau.
WLF’s conditional approval comes a little over a month after Trump reported more than $1.1 billion in crypto earnings in financial disclosures from last year, a sum that included more than $515 million from WLF token sales and $65 million from sales of equity in the venture’s holding company.
The OCC says final approval of WLF’s charter is contingent on the company meeting criteria including holding $20 million in high-quality, Tier 1 capital and a minimum of $10 million in liquid assets; informing the bureau before WLF appoints a senior executive officer; and retaining an internal auditor.
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The national trust charter does not give WLF approval to operate a traditional bank’s full suite of banking and lending services, which would come with stricter oversight from the Federal Reserve. The OCC has granted conditional approvals to about a dozen crypto firms under the leadership of comptroller Jonathan Gould, who Trump nominated earlier this year.
WLF first applied for the charter on Jan. 5, the approval of which appeared a foregone conclusion to former staffers and industry watchers. An entity tied to the Trump family owns a 38% stake in the crypto company, which is partly managed by the president’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. The president owns 70% of that LLC.
Senators recently punted a vote on the CLARITY Act, a cryptocurrency guardrails measure that has prompted additional discussion over the president’s ability to earn high figures from digital assets.
“This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), the top Democrat on the Banking Committee, in a post to X following the conditional approval.
The preliminary approval letter acknowledged public comments expressing concern that Gould would not enforce regulations on WLF or would unfairly enforce regulations on competitors, and that the charter does not align with bureau precedent. Senior Deputy Comptroller Stephen A. Lybarger said in the letter that career OCC staff had reviewed and approved the application.
WLF has already come under scrutiny for conflicts of interest, including Trump’s October 2025 pardoning of Changpeng Zhao, whose company holds more than half of USD1s in circulation, and Emirati officials purchasing a 49% stake in the crypto firm days before the president’s inauguration.
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