“We are a national bank. The only difference is our business line, that we’re doing crypto assets versus doing other assets,” Anchorage President Diogo Mónica said in an interview. “The benefit of having a federally chartered bank is that it preempts all the state laws. The clarity of being regulated by the oldest regulator for banks in the United States … sends a very clear message.”

Acting OCC chief Brian Brooks, speaking at a public event earlier Wednesday, expressed his belief that banks and financial services more broadly will transition to being blockchain-based.

Anchorage’s trust company unit first applied for a national charter from the OCC last November, and it joins Kraken and Avanti in being crypto-native banks, although the latter two are special-purpose depository institutions organized under Wyoming state law. Fellow crypto startups BitPay and Paxos have also applied for federal charters through the OCC.

The new bank is being ushered in under the auspices of Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks, who’s headed up the regulator since this past summer. It’s the capstone to a multi-month effort to bring the crypto industry closer to the traditional banking world.