The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has granted preliminary conditional approval to OpenReserve Bank for national bank charter.
OpenReserve Bank will be a full-service national bank that brings native onchain settlement into the perimeter of federally supervised banking. It will also offer commercial and retail lending products, a treasury management platform, traditional and tokenized deposit products, and stablecoin infrastructure.
The institution is being built to reduce fragmentation across financial systems while maintaining clear accountability, strong controls, and transparent boundaries between banking and affiliated activities.
“Preliminary conditional approval to charter a de novo national bank is a privilege our team does not take lightly. It is a significant milestone and the beginning of the most demanding phase of the work,” Dee Choubey, co-founder and CEO of OpenReserve Bank, said. “We chose the national bank path deliberately. Supervision, safety and soundness, compliance, and customer confidence are not constraints on what we are building; they are the foundation of it. We are grateful for the rigor of the OCC’s review and will approach every preopening requirement with the same discipline.”
Before commencing banking operations, OpenReserve Bank must satisfy the OCC’s preopening requirements and receive the OCC’s final approval to open.
“American banking has always advanced by bringing new technology inside the regulated system rather than around it, from the founding of the national banking system, to electronic clearing, to the card networks. Programmable onchain settlement is the next chapter, and we believe it should be written by a chartered national bank under federal supervision,” Choubey added. “OpenReserve Bank is our contribution to that tradition: durable financial infrastructure, built in the United States, to standards the world can rely on.”
During the preopening period, OpenReserve Bank expects to continue building out its executive leadership, governance, risk management, compliance, capital, technology, and operating capabilities.
“Our prospective customers run global businesses that operate continuously, and there is real capital to unlock when their bank works the same way,” Richard Correia, OpenReserve Bank co-founder and president, said. “That is what we are building: one unified onchain ledger inside a national bank, where payments settle instantly in any market, the assets a company already owns can be financed against that same ledger, and every asset becomes working capital rather than a line item. Our Forward Deployed Solutions team works alongside customers, integrating OpenReserve Bank (in organization) where their business actually runs. That is the first continuous bank.”
OpenReserve Bank also announced seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Jump Capital, Acrew, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, Clocktower, Quona, AAF Management, and Zero Knowledge Ventures.