- Key insight: President Donald Trump’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial is asking the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust bank charter, leading some to question whether the agency has a choice in approving the application.
- Supporting data: The OCC conditionally approved five national trust charters for similar crypto firms in December.
- Forward look: The application will be considered by the OCC, but banking experts say the president could lean on the agency for a variety of reasons, including regulatory treatment.
Tuesday’s announcement that World Liberty Trust, an affiliate of President Trump’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial, had applied for a national trust charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is raising concerns about a conflict of interest amongst banking experts.
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Todd Phillips, an assistant professor at Georgia State University and former FDIC official, says the fact that a Trump-affiliated company is applying for a license with a Trump-appointed regulator in itself raises conflict of interest concerns because the president can fire the person tasked with judging the merits of the application.
“The President did not have significant financial interests in any of the firms that had applied for a trust charter previously,” Phillips said. “The comptroller is subject to oversight by the President, and if the President wants to tell the Comptroller to approve the charter application, he can do that — and if the Comptroller says no, because there are issues with the application, the president can fire the Comptroller.”
The comptroller of the currency — the head of the agency considering the application — is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but the OCC is nominally an office of the Treasury Department. The OCC — which has received and conditionally approved a number of trust applications despite the banking industry’s protests this year — said WLT’s affiliation with the president shouldn’t have any bearing on the application’s review and that the agency welcomes applications, so long as they meet the statutory standards and supervisory expectations.
“Applications are submitted by institutions of their own volition and are all evaluated under the same statutory and procedural framework,” an OCC spokesperson said. “After submission, the OCC conducts rigorous reviews to determine whether, in fact, applicants meet the statutory standards and can comply with our supervisory expectations before providing conditional and ultimately final approval if warranted.”
President Trump, his sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr., and associate Steve Witkoff started the cryptocurrency company World Liberty Financial in September 2024, just ahead of the presidential election. After Trump’s victory in December 2024, Witkoff and Changpeng Zhao — the founder of crypto exchange Binance — met at a Middle Eastern bitcoin conference, according to the lawmakers.
World Liberty Financial reportedly floated the idea of creating a stablecoin with Binance in March, and later WLF issued a stablecoin, with Binance writing the basic code to power the asset. Witkoff-affiliated Emirate firm MGX later invested over $2 billion in the form of Trump’s stablecoin USD1 in Binance, enriching the Trump family as part of that investment. After Trump took office, Zhao applied for a pardon from his
Joseph Lynyak III, a partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney, argued that the Trump family’s financial stake in crypto could indicate the industry wields inappropriate influence over administration policy.
“[This is] highly suspicious in terms of the conflict of interest issues,” Lynyak said. “[It appears they are] exerting influence over the OCC to promote these issues in a matter favorable to the crypto industry.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., criticized World Liberty Trust’s application, arguing it cannot be objectively reviewed given the president’s interest in the company.
“The application will be reviewed, and presumably approved, by a regulator that serves at the pleasure of the President,” Warren argued in a statement. “We have never seen financial conflicts or corruption of this magnitude — and the Senate must address this in its consideration of crypto market structure legislation in the coming days. Our banking regulators are supposed to ensure that businesses and households have fair access to credit and that our economy benefits from a stable banking system, not enrich their boss — the President of the United States.”
The Independent Community Bankers of America, which has opposed fintech companies like Stripe’s stablecoin branch Bridge’s application for a national trust charter, asked the OCC to reject the applications that propose allowing trust companies to engage in nonfiduciary, or traditional banking services. ICBA, which declined to comment on the WLF application, says such applications exceed the national trust charter’s scope and give fintechs unfair advantages like more lenient capital requirements without being required to insure consumer funds with the FDIC.
Phillips says a number of concerns arise from the move, including ramifications beyond the initial charter approval. He argues the conflict of interest could extend to the regulation and competitive treatment of the firm.
“There are definitely a couple of things that could happen: putting pressure on the Comptroller to take a light touch approach to WLF and taking a much tougher approach on regulation to competitors of WLF, in order to give WLF a competitive advantage,” Phillips said. “If the comptroller takes a light touch approach to regulating World Liberty, and the World Liberty stablecoin fails and there’s a run, it could cause contagion to other stablecoins that are well regulated, and it could just cause more of a financial panic unnecessarily.”
Lynyak says that, while such appearances of conflict would have been highly controversial in any other presidency, the Trump era has normalized once unthinkable business moves into being almost mundane.
“I think it’s all somewhat interconnected, the way that it has worked,” Lynyak said. “In a different time, in a different place, you would probably hear people screaming bloody murder about what has occurred — but we’re on Earth 2, we’re not on Earth 1.”