A price chart on the Bybit website for the cryptocurrency Ethereum is seen on a computer screen in New York on Friday evening, Feb. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Patrick Sison)
Patrick Sison/AP
A proposed crypto-based bank, headquartered in Dallas, is a step closer to fruition.
Augustus National Bank received preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on May 8. It plans to be a branchless full-service insured national bank with a wholly owned stablecoin subsidiary, “to engage in issuance, custody, conversion, and payment of U.S. dollar-denominated reserve-backed stablecoins,” according to the OCC’s decision filing.
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Augustus will have the capability to receive digital assets as banking fees and hold digital assets on its balance sheet, and it will let customers do cross-border money transfers using digital assets.
“We have received OCC conditional approval to charter the first clearing bank for the AI era,” the company wrote in a LinkedIn post Monday. “This approval has been driven by our core thesis: the dollar is the best product in the history of the world, with practically infinite global demand — but distribution is broken. The existing clearing model runs on legacy correspondents that are closed 115 days a year, built for humans, and take two days to settle.”
“Augustus is the update to the AI era: an autonomous clearing bank, purpose-built around programmable money and stablecoins. Always open. Made for machines. At the speed of compute,” the post continues.
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According to an announcement, Augustus was founded in 2022 and has raised $40 million, with backing from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Creandum — whose portfolio includes Spotify and Klarna — and others.
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The bank’s mission, according to the announcement, is to advance “Western currency dominance … an essential instrument of soft power for the West,” citing growing competition for cross-border clearing and settlement services from China and Russia that could challenge the dollar and euro’s dominance in international transactions.
“Augustus’ core banking infrastructure is made for machines: designed from the ground up for durable, non-deterministic, agent-initiated workflows — unlocking near autonomous operations at scale,” the announcement says. It notes that Augustus subsidiaries are already operating in Europe and have experienced 10x growth year over year.
Ferdinand Dabitz will be the bank’s CEO. The 25-year-old German is a Thiel Fellow, which includes a grant of $250,000 for young people who want to forgo college and “build new things.” Augustus touts him as the youngest CEO of a federally chartered bank “in modern American history.”
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In a LinkedIn post, Dabitz says the name Augustus was chosen because of Rome’s first emperor who ruled from 27 BC to AD 14 was Julius Caesar’s adopted heir and thwarted challenges from Mark Antony and Cleopatra, among others.
“Augustus was the inventor of modern currency,” Dabitz wrote in the post. “When he came into power every province had their own coin. He centralized the mint, the coinage and invented what we still know today: The national currency system.”
Greg Quarles, formerly the CEO of Green Dot Bank, United Texas Bank and H&R Block Bank, will serve as president of Augustus. Joe Schenone, an alum of JPMorgan Chase and Japan’s MUFG, will service as CFO.
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“[Traditional clearing banks] are made of paper. They’re slow, they close on weekends, and they’re not fit for purpose anymore,” Dabitz said in an interview with CNBC. “We want to replace the paper with code. We want to build a bank made of code, and we want to rethink the clearing bank as an AI application, and we think you can do it if you build from scratch and you own the whole thing.”