OpenReserve Emerges From Stealth With OCC Nod for an Onchain National Bank
MoneyLion co-founder Dee Choubey's new venture has preliminary conditional approval to charter a full-service national bank built around onchain settlement and tokenised deposits.
OpenReserve, the new venture from MoneyLion co-founder Dee Choubey, has emerged from stealth with preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to charter OpenReserve Bank, N.A., a full-service national bank built around onchain settlement.
The OCC granted the approval on 3 September. The proposed bank must raise at least $210m in initial paid-in capital, net of organisational and pre-opening expenses, and must satisfy the OCC's pre-opening requirements and receive final approval before it can open.
OpenReserve Holdings was founded in 2025 by Choubey, previously co-founder and chief executive of MoneyLion, and Richard Correia, who serves as president. Seed investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Jump Capital, Acrew, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, Clocktower, Quona, AAF Management and Zero Knowledge Ventures.
Planned services, set out in the company's announcement, cover commercial and retail lending, a treasury management platform, traditional and tokenised deposit products, digital asset custody, foreign correspondent banking, and stablecoin infrastructure designed to comply with the GENIUS Act.
"Supervision, safety and soundness, compliance, and customer confidence are not constraints on what we are building; they are the foundation of it," said Choubey.
He added: "Programmable, onchain settlement is the next chapter, and we believe it should be written by a chartered national bank under federal supervision."
Correia described the target architecture as "one unified onchain ledger inside a national bank, where payments settle instantly in any market".
Inside the perimeter
The pitch here is the inverse of the usual crypto-meets-banking proposition. Rather than building settlement infrastructure outside the regulated system and seeking accommodation later, OpenReserve is proposing to bring onchain settlement inside the federal supervisory perimeter from the start, with direct Federal Reserve connectivity and tokenised deposits sitting on the same ledger as conventional ones.
That is a meaningfully different bet from the stablecoin issuers, and it is a direct answer to the argument advanced by the Bank for International Settlements and others that tokenised deposits, being liabilities of supervised banks, are the sounder foundation for programmable money than stablecoins are.
The capital requirement is the immediate test. At a minimum of $210m, the OCC has set a bar well above what a conventional de novo would face, which is a reasonable proxy for how it views the risk profile of the business plan.
It is the second conditional approval for a high-profile fintech charter in the same week, following Revolut, in what is becoming the most permissive US chartering environment in years.
