Looks like the Trump family is really about to open a bank. The OCC has granted a conditional approval to World Liberty Trust. This isn’t your average DeFi project announcing some partnership. This is a preliminary approval for a U.S. national trust bank charter. World Liberty is the Trump family’s flagship crypto project. Their stablecoin, USD1, now has a circulation nearing $4 billion. Entities linked to the Trump family still hold about 38%. The key point is, if this license is fully approved in the end, WLF will be able to take full control of USD1’s issuance, redemption, dollar reserves, and institutional custody. Right now, most of these processes are handled by BitGo. In the future, the middleman might be completely cut out. USD1 will then become: Self-issued Self-custodied Self-profiting from reserve interest Self-explaining compliance to institutions Even USDT doesn’t have this kind of license. While this isn’t a traditional bank that can take deposits and issue loans, for a stablecoin, it’s more than enough. Because the most profitable part of stablecoins isn’t transaction fees, it’s the fact that users hold $1 worth of coins, and the dollar reserves behind them are used to buy short-term bonds, with the interest staying within the issuing system. With $4 billion in reserves, and short-term U.S. Treasury yields around 3.7%, that’s roughly $150 million in gross annual interest. For this kind of conditional approval from the OCC, they’ll still need to meet requirements for capital, risk control, and compliance— like having at least $20 million in Tier 1 capital. But for WLF, that’s really not a big deal. People used to say Trump issuing a coin was just a cash grab. Now it seems, that was short-sighted. They might actually be aiming to open a stablecoin bank. The Trump family has already started earning interest on dollar reserves.