Block has asked the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to approve Builders Bank & Trust, N.A., but the filing is still an application, not a charter. For crypto users and fintech investors, the important detail is the type of bank Block wants: an uninsured, non-depository national trust bank that would sit behind parts of its digital-asset business if the OCC signs off.
| What you need to know |
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| 1Block's application is dated 4 September 2026. |
| 2Builders Bank would be uninsured and non-depository if approved. |
| 3The proposed activities include digital-asset custody, order execution, transfers and stablecoin settlement. |
| 4The filing cites about $10.7 billion of Block Bitcoin volume in fiscal 2025. |
What Block has filed
The public application package says the organizers of Builders Bank & Trust, N.A. submitted the request to the OCC on 4 September 2026, with Block, Inc. as the sponsoring organization. The proposed institution is listed for Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Block is named as the holding company.
The filing describes the bank as a de novo non-depository national bank. That phrasing matters. It means the proposal is not for Cash App to become a normal retail bank, and it is not a claim that customer deposits would carry FDIC insurance. The application says Builders Bank would not maintain deposit insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The crypto services in scope
Block frames the bank as infrastructure for its existing digital-asset customer base and a broader set of future customers. Over the three-year de novo period, the filing says Builders Bank would provide fiduciary custody and safekeeping for certain digital assets, including bitcoin and other assets. It also lists execution of customer buy and sell orders on a riskless-principal basis, execution of deposit, withdrawal and transfer instructions, and stablecoin settlement and transfer services.
That does not mean the OCC has approved those activities. It also does not mean Block is announcing a stablecoin issuer or a full-service bank. The safer reading is narrower: Block wants one federally chartered trust-bank wrapper for parts of its crypto custody and transaction flow, and the OCC still has to review the request.
Why the OCC process matters
The OCC’s charters and licensing section is the public entry point for national-bank applications, corporate application search and digital-asset licensing materials. For a crypto company, that process can be strategically valuable because it replaces a patchwork of state permissions with a federal trust-bank framework for the specific activities that are approved.
Block’s filing leans on scale to explain why the charter matters. The application says Block has operated regulated digital-asset services for about eight years, under more than 50 state money-transmitter and virtual-currency licenses. It also says Block facilitated about $10.7 billion in annual Bitcoin transaction volume in fiscal 2025 and had about two million Cash App digital-asset monthly transacting actives as of the second quarter of 2026. Those are Block-reported figures in the filing, not an OCC finding.
What readers should watch next
The practical checkpoint is not a launch date. It is whether the OCC accepts, narrows, conditions or rejects the application. Until that happens, Builders Bank remains a proposed trust bank. If approved, the signal would be that Block can move a defined slice of bitcoin, digital-asset custody and stablecoin settlement work into a federally chartered vehicle. If not, the company remains on its current state-licensed path while the broader crypto-bank charter race continues.
