Coinbase Global said it has received conditional approval from U.S. banking regulators for a national trust company charter, a move that could broaden the crypto exchange’s role in digital-asset custody and open the door to new business lines, Bloomberg reported.

Full approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) would allow Coinbase to operate as a crypto custodian on a federal basis, potentially making it easier for large institutions to entrust assets to the company. Greg Tusar, Coinbase’s vice president of product management, told the news outlet that the charter could also create a path for the company to expand into businesses such as issuing stablecoins and tokenized securities.

“The ability to have a federal framework for our custody business is important,” Tusar said in the report “This is about us growing our reach and being able to conduct new business that we may not have been able to before.”

Coinbase applied in October to operate a non-insured national trust company, Bloomberg said. Such an entity can hold assets in a custodial capacity but cannot engage in traditional banking activities such as deposit-taking or lending.

The approval would further entrench Coinbase at the center of the crypto market’s infrastructure. The company already serves as custodian for most U.S.-listed spot crypto exchange-traded funds and for asset managers entering the sector, giving it a key role in institutional access to digital assets, the news agency said. 

The company has been seeking new revenue streams that would make it less vulnerable to crypto market downturns, and the current “crypto winter,” which began in October, has seen Bitcoin fall by about 45 percent, according to the report. 

Coinbase is one of several crypto firms, including Ripple, World Liberty Financial, and EDX, seeking similar approvals in what it described as a favorable regulatory climate under President Donald Trump. Those charters are seen as increasingly important because they could help the industry overcome lingering regulatory uncertainty while Congress has yet to advance a market-structure bill through a key Senate committee, Bloomberg said.

Read more at Bloomberg