We’ve applied to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust bank charter.
Today, Dakota operates in the U.S. as a registered Money Services Business. A National Trust Bank Charter would position Dakota as a federally regulated provider of digital asset custody, stablecoin issuance, and related services, and a partner of choice for corporate and institutional clients building on us.
For you, that means fewer layers between your product and the financial services underneath it. Fewer intermediaries mean more control, more reliability, and a cleaner experience for the people you serve. That’s always been the point: the less that sits between you and what you’re building, the better the product you can put in front of your customers.
It’s the same reason we became infrastructure in the first place. There are so many hurdles that make building financial products hard: distributed licensing, compliance that runs as a periodic scramble instead of as code, payment rails never built for programmable or agent-native money. So instead of working around that, we rebuilt from the foundation and became the layer underneath.
Nothing about this changes what you rely on today. The application is in. The work continues. And it’s all pointed at making what you build easier, more reliable, and more possible.