Block applied for a bank that takes no deposits and makes no loans

Block filed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on 4 September to charter Builders Bank & Trust, Decrypt reported. The word bank means something narrow here: the institution would be uninsured and non-depository, with no branches and an address in Sioux Falls.

Builders Bank would hold things. Custody of bitcoin and other digital assets, customer buy and sell orders on a riskless principal basis, and stablecoin settlement. No deposits and no lending.

Fifty licences into one

Block runs its digital asset business today on more than 50 state money transmitter and virtual currency licences. Each carries its own examiner, its own renewal and its own filings.

A national trust charter replaces that stack with one federal supervisor. That is the operational reason companies in this queue give, and one relationship costs less to run than fifty.

“Building on Block's experience in the digital asset space, our history with Square Financial Services, and the deep banking expertise of the team we've assembled, we believe Builders Bank is well positioned to support Block's broader vision of economic empowerment.”

— Lee Woolley, The Block, 8 September 2026

Lee Woolley, who would serve as president and chief executive of Builders Bank. Source: The Block, 8 September 2026

Woolley leads digital asset strategy at Block and has run parts of Northern Trust and BNY Mellon. His mention of Square Financial Services points at something most of the coverage skipped: Block already owns a bank. Square Financial Services takes deposits and makes loans, while Builders Bank would only hold assets.

The queue at the OCC

The regulator has handed conditional approvals to eight crypto firms already, among them Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, Crypto.com and Coinbase. Five more sit pending, among them Morgan Stanley, Payoneer, Zerohash, Payward and World Liberty Financial.

One application has been turned down. The OCC denied Wise National Trust in July. On decided cases that is eight yes and one no, which tells you what the odds have looked like so far.

We covered Revolut's charter approval last week and Circle paying $400 million for licences the week before. The pattern in all three is the same: buy or apply for permission, then build on top of it.

What the numbers say about scale

Block moved about $10.7 billion of bitcoin across all of 2025 and served roughly two million monthly crypto users through Cash App by the second quarter of this year.

Set the first figure against the market it operates in. Bitcoin turned over $33.9 billion in the past 24 hours, so Block's entire 2025 volume equals about 7.6 hours of global spot trading. Spread across those users it comes to $5,350 each for the year.

The charter aims elsewhere. A trust bank earns fees on the balances it holds, and that business grows with what sits in custody rather than with how often it moves.

What a customer should read into it

An uninsured trust bank carries no federal deposit insurance, because it holds no deposits to insure. Anyone reading the word bank as a guarantee has read it wrong.

What approval would give Block is one regulator instead of fifty, a clearer path to serving institutions, and a supervisor with the power to examine how customer bitcoin is held. The application went in five days ago, and the OCC has taken months on every one of the others.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.