OpenReserve Bank received preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on September 2 to charter a full-service national bank in Salt Lake City, Utah. The approval came just under five months after the company filed its application on April 13.
The company must raise at least $210 million in initial paid-in capital and maintain a Tier 1 leverage ratio of at least 12% through its first three years of operation. OpenReserve has until September 2027 to raise the capital and until March 2028 to open for business. If either deadline is missed, the preliminary approval expires.
OpenReserve is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, Jump Capital, and Wintermute Ventures, among others. The company secured a $25 million seed round led by a16z crypto.
Co-founder Diwakar Choubey, who previously ran MoneyLion, emphasized that OpenReserve deliberately pursued a full national bank charter rather than the national trust charter route chosen by competitors like Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, Paxos, and BitGo. A full national bank charter permits deposit-taking and lending, whereas a national trust charter limits activity to custody and fiduciary work.
OpenReserve's business plan centers on tokenized deposits, treasury management, foreign correspondent banking, and a banking-as-a-service platform for institutional clients. The company also intends to establish a separate subsidiary to issue and redeem U.S. dollar-denominated, reserve-backed stablecoins, though that application has not yet been filed with the OCC. Any stablecoin activity will need to comply with the GENIUS Act, which governs stablecoin operations and took effect in July of the prior year.
The OCC also granted British fintech Revolut preliminary conditional approval for a national bank in Connecticut during the same period. Comptroller Jonathan Gould has characterized these approvals as part of a broader effort to bring firms developing novel technology into the federally supervised banking system.
