Week 37 (2026) · BTC Weekly

Block filed for an OCC national trust bank charter — putting Cash App's Bitcoin custody infrastructure in line for a single federal supervisor to replace its patchwork of state licenses.

Builders Bank & Trust, N.A., disclosed September 8, would operate as an uninsured national trust bank: no deposits, no loans, custody and fiduciary services only for Bitcoin, stablecoins, and related digital assets. Cash App processed $10.7 billion in Bitcoin volume in 2025 and served two million active crypto users per month through the second quarter of 2026; the OCC application would fold more than 50 state custody licenses into one federal charter. The OCC received 40 new-bank applications in the 18 months preceding August 2026, of which 23 involved digital-asset activities — parallel applications from Ripple, Circle, and BitGo are already in queue. A former Northern Trust and BNY Mellon executive was named Builders Bank's first president and CEO.

One federal charter eliminates per-state compliance overhead and positions Block to compete for institutional custody mandates that currently require the legal certainty of federally supervised infrastructure.

(Banking Dive, TFTC)

Senate Republicans released a revised CLARITY Act five days before a cloture vote that could advance Bitcoin's permanent commodity classification to a full Senate floor debate.

The revised 630-page bill, posted September 10, added more than 114 provisions requested by Senate Democrats while narrowing DeFi provisions to cover only spot and cash digital-commodity transactions. Under the bill, Bitcoin is classified as a digital commodity under CFTC jurisdiction; the revision adds a requirement that "non-decentralized" trading protocols — platforms where individuals or groups can materially alter system operations — register with the CFTC. The September 15 cloture vote requires 60 senators to proceed; Democrats have not collectively endorsed the bill despite the added provisions, and an ethics section barring federal officials and their spouses from issuing digital assets remains a contested flashpoint. No floor vote is scheduled should cloture succeed.

Should the September 15 cloture vote clear 60 senators, the bill would advance to the first full Senate floor debate on comprehensive crypto market structure legislation — permanently assigning Bitcoin to CFTC jurisdiction rather than leaving its classification to agency-by-agency interpretation.

(DailyCoin, CryptoBasic)