The Company That Wants to Be Wall Street's Crypto Backbone

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On March 4, Zerohash filed an application for a national trust bank charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). On February, Morgan Stanley had filed the same application for a new subsidiary called Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, National Association. The public comment period on Morgan Stanley’s application closes on March 20.

Two filings. A few days apart. One investor. The same infrastructure partnership underneath both of them.

What Zerohash is

Zerohash has been building crypto and stablecoin infrastructure for financial institutions since 2017. Its model is not to offer services directly to consumers. It provides the backend that allows other companies to offer crypto services to their own customers, without building the underlying technology themselves.

Its client list includes Interactive Brokers, Stripe, BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund, Franklin Templeton, DraftKings, Kalshi, Lightspark, Tastytrade, and Republic. The platform serves over five million end users across 190 countries, operating regulated entities across 51 US jurisdictions. CEO Edward Woodford has described the company as building the Amazon Web Services of on-chain infrastructure. The description is precise. AWS does not compete with the applications built on top of it. It provides the layer those applications depend on. Zerohash occupies the same structural position in the crypto infrastructure stack.

In October 2025, Mastercard entered late-stage talks to acquire Zerohash for up to $2 billion. Zerohash walked away, choosing to remain independent. By January 2026 it was in talks to raise $250 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. In September 2025, it had already closed a $104 million Series D-2 round that brought its valuation to $1 billion. Interactive Brokers led that round, with new participation from Morgan Stanley, SoFi, Apollo-managed funds, Jump Crypto, and others, marking the first crypto infrastructure investment for several of those institutions. Morgan Stanley did not invest in a vendor. It invested in the company it was already planning to build its crypto business on top of.

The Morgan Stanley connection

In September 2025, Morgan Stanley announced a partnership with Zerohash to enable crypto trading through its ETRADE platform, with launch planned for the first half of 2026. The OCC charter application sits within a broader strategy. Morgan Stanley is building a vertically integrated crypto value chain: ETFs for straightforward market access, ETRADE for retail trading, and the new trust bank entity for custody and staking.

The trust bank, if approved, would be an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Morgan Stanley Capital Management, headquartered in Purchase, New York, and focused on digital asset custody and fiduciary services for wealth management clients.

Morgan Stanley’s application is specifically structured to support its partnership with Zerohash to let E*TRADE clients trade crypto. The two filings are not coincidental. They are parallel moves in the same strategy. Morgan Stanley is building the custody and staking layer. Zerohash is filing for the federal charter that will allow it to operate that infrastructure under a single national framework rather than fifty-one separate state licences.

Why the OCC charter matters for Zerohash specifically

Zerohash is not a new entrant to regulated financial services. It already holds a trust company charter from the North Carolina Commissioner of Banks, received in March 2025 and operational from September 2025. It is also a FinCEN-registered money service business and a licensed money transmitter across 51 US jurisdictions.

The OCC filing is a different move. A national trust bank charter means federal oversight, a single regulatory framework, and the ability to operate across the entire country under one licence. For a company whose clients include institutions operating at national and global scale, the difference between a state charter and a federal one is not administrative. It is structural.

A federal trust charter would also let Zerohash offer services aligned with provisions in the GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin framework the United States passed in July 2025. Zerohash’s clients are not using its infrastructure for crypto speculation. They are using it for stablecoin payments, tokenised asset settlement, and digital asset custody. A federal charter positions Zerohash to serve those use cases under the regulatory framework that will govern them.

The clients in the room

This is where the story becomes something the Morgan Stanley framing misses.
Morgan Stanley is one client. It is the most prominent investor and the most visible partnership. But the OCC charter application is not filed on behalf of the Morgan Stanley relationship. It is filed on behalf of all of Zerohash’s institutional relationships simultaneously.

Interactive Brokers, which led Zerohash’s most recent funding round, offers crypto trading to its own clients through Zerohash’s infrastructure. Franklin Templeton uses Zerohash for tokenised asset payment rails. BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund, the largest tokenised money market fund in existence, runs on infrastructure Zerohash supports. Stripe uses Zerohash for payment products. Kalshi, the federally regulated prediction market, uses it for account funding.

Each of those relationships currently sits under a patchwork of state licences and bilateral agreements. A federal national trust bank charter consolidates the regulatory foundation under all of them at once. It gives Zerohash the institutional credibility to custody assets for Morgan Stanley’s wealth management clients, the federal standing to operate as a stablecoin infrastructure provider under the GENIUS Act, and the single-licence efficiency that makes it viable to scale those relationships further.

The wider context

As FintechWeekly reported, the race for federal digital asset charters accelerated significantly in late 2025. In December 2025, the OCC under Comptroller Jonathan Gould granted conditional approval to Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos.

Three further conditional approvals followed in early 2026 for Stripe’s Bridge, Crypto.com, and Protego. Anchorage Digital remains the only crypto-native company to have completed the full transition from conditional to final charter approval.

Gould told the US Senate that the OCC received fewer than four charter applications per year on average between 2011 and 2024. In 2025 and 2026 alone, fourteen de novo applications were filed. The pace is not a coincidence. The OCC’s final rule, effective April 1, 2026, explicitly clarified that national trust banks can conduct non-fiduciary activities including crypto custody. The regulatory window is open and companies are moving through it.

The pace has not gone uncontested. The Bank Policy Institute, a trade group whose board includes the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America, is considering filing a lawsuit against the OCC over its decision to grant national trust bank charters to crypto and fintech firms. The group has retained outside counsel and is actively reviewing legal options. Its argument is that the OCC has reinterpreted federal licensing rules in a way that allows crypto companies to enter the banking system under lighter oversight than that applied to full-service banks. If the BPI proceeds, the legal challenge would put the entire OCC charter programme — and every pending application including Zerohash’s — under direct judicial scrutiny.

Zerohash and Morgan Stanley are not early movers in this wave. Circle, Ripple, Fidelity, and BitGo got there first. What makes the Zerohash filing structurally significant is not its timing. It is the position the company already occupies in the institutional crypto market before the charter is even granted.

What happens next

The public comment period on Morgan Stanley’s application closes March 20. Zerohash’s application, filed March 4, will follow the same review process. The OCC has not given a timeline for either decision.

Approval is not guaranteed, though both applications align with the pattern of recent OCC actions on similar crypto-focused trust charters. For Zerohash, the outcome will determine whether the infrastructure it already provides to Wall Street’s largest institutions operates under a state patchwork or a single federal framework — and whether a potential Bank Policy Institute legal challenge freezes that determination before it is made.

The company that Woodford describes as the AWS of on-chain infrastructure is asking the federal government to treat it that way. The March 20 comment deadline is the first marker on that path.

Editor’s note: We are committed to accuracy. If you spot an error, a missing detail, or have additional information about any of the companies or filings mentioned in this article, please email us at [email protected]. We will review and update promptly.