On Dec. 12, the Trump Administration’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a division of the U.S. Treasury Department, granted two crypto giants, Ripple and Circle, preliminary approval to establish “trust banks.” This step puts crypto currencies, which have only nominal value, at the center of the U.S. financial system. This is part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s stated effort to make “America the crypto capital of the world.”
Trust banks are financial institutions that generally do not take deposits from citizens nor make loans; they are depositories to hold investments, and sometimes purchase investments. But in the case of crypto trust banks, they safekeep digital assets, and issue stablecoins, thus they possess an issuing capability. Therefore, they can make markets in crypto, and apparently backstop crypto in the case of crises, such as loss of value.
Ripple and Circle have been temporarily approved by the OCC, but there appears to be nothing to impede it from becoming permanent. Ripple owns 42% of XRP, which is a bridge “currency,” which allows financial institutions to transfer financial instruments across borders in seconds. As for Circle (the company behind the USDC stablecoin), its largest investors include BlackRock, Fidelity, and Goldman Sachs.
President Trump nominated Jonathan Gould as the Comptroller of the Currency, who assumed office in July 2025. Previously, Gould ascended the ranks to become a director of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset-management company, and a thoroughly filthy operation, from 2014-18.
At the top of the crypto process is David Sacks, whom Trump officially appointed as the “White House AI & Crypto Czar.” Sacks was part of the “PayPal Mafia,” which set up PayPal. Among its members and two of Sacks’s longest-standing associates and close friends are fellow South African Elon Musk, who ran Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” which ripped apart and fired U.S. federal workers; and Peter Thiel, who is involved in very dirty intelligence networks and admires Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s Crown Jurist. The overall process is run by and for the benefit of City of London and Wall Street financiers.
Circle and Ripple, as approved “trust banks,” will soon be followed by three other crypto-trading firms—Fidelity, Paxos, and Bitgo—which the OCC also approved on Dec. 12 to establish “trust banks.” The function of the “trust banks” is likely to liquify the crypto market and spread crypto’s dominance. In this process, they will undermine the sovereignty of national currencies, and dismantle physical economies.
