Crypto custodian Protego gets national charter from the OCC

Protego joins Anchorage as the first string of digital asset firms to get national trust bank licensing.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has granted another crypto firm a national charter.

Per an announcement shared with Cointelegraph today, Washington-based institutional crypto custodian Protego is the second crypto-native firm to get national licensing from the OCC. 

The new charter is conditional, and Protego is authorized as a national trust bank rather than a traditional bank, meaning that it will not handle deposits. Interestingly, Protego is a relatively new firm and is still in the process of organizing. It will have 18 months to launch operations before the current charter expires.

The OCC is the office of the U.S. Treasury responsible for regulating national banks. Over the past year, it has made much work of integrating crypto into that purview, including giving the first national charter of this kind to Anchorage just last month. 

Not everyone has been happy with the OCC’s interest in onboarding crypto firms. A consortium of state banking regulators recently filed suit against the OCC over Figure’s application for a national charter, claiming that the OCC is stretching the definition of a bank beyond recognition.