{"id":292725,"date":"2026-05-14T11:32:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T11:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/292725\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T11:32:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T11:32:13","slug":"peter-thiel-backed-crypto-based-bank-to-launch-in-dallas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/292725\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Thiel-backed, crypto-based bank to launch in Dallas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

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)<\/p>\n

Patrick Sison\/AP<\/p>\n

A proposed crypto-based bank, headquartered in Dallas, is a step closer to fruition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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, \u201cto engage in issuance, custody, conversion, and payment of U.S. dollar-denominated reserve-backed stablecoins,\u201d according to the OCC\u2019s decision filing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have received OCC conditional approval to charter the first clearing bank for the AI era,\u201d the company wrote in a LinkedIn post Monday<\/a>. \u201cThis 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\u00a0\u2014 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAugustus 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,\u201d the post continues.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Make Dallas News a preferred source so your search results prioritize writing by actual people, not AI.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

According to an announcement, Augustus was founded in 2022 and has raised $40 million, with backing from Peter Thiel\u2019s Valar Ventures, Creandum\u00a0\u2014 whose portfolio includes\u00a0Spotify and\u00a0Klarna\u00a0\u2014 and others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n

The bank\u2019s mission, according to the announcement, is to advance \u201cWestern currency dominance \u2026 an essential instrument of soft power for the West,\u201d citing growing competition for cross-border clearing and settlement services from China and Russia that could challenge the dollar and euro\u2019s dominance in international transactions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAugustus\u2019 core banking infrastructure is made for machines: designed from the ground up for durable, non-deterministic, agent-initiated workflows \u2014 unlocking near autonomous operations at scale,\u201d the announcement says. It notes that Augustus subsidiaries are already operating in Europe and have experienced 10x growth year over year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ferdinand Dabitz will be the bank\u2019s CEO. The 25-year-old German is a\u00a0Thiel Fellow<\/a>, which includes a grant of $250,000 for young people who want to forgo college and \u201cbuild new things.\u201d\u00a0Augustus touts him as the youngest CEO of a federally chartered bank \u201cin modern American history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n

In a LinkedIn post, Dabitz says the name\u00a0Augustus was chosen because of Rome\u2019s first emperor who ruled from 27 BC to AD 14 was Julius Caesar\u2019s adopted heir and thwarted challenges from Mark Antony and Cleopatra, among others.<\/p>\n

\u201cAugustus was the inventor of modern currency,\u201d Dabitz wrote in the post. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Greg Quarles, formerly the CEO of Green Dot Bank, United Texas Bank and H&R Block Bank, will serve as president of Augustus. Joe\u00a0Schenone, an alum of JPMorgan Chase and Japan\u2019s MUFG, will service as CFO.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n

\u201c[Traditional clearing banks] are made of paper. They\u2019re slow, they close on weekends, and they\u2019re not fit for purpose anymore,\u201d Dabitz said in an interview with\u00a0CNBC.\u00a0\u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A price chart on the Bybit website for the cryptocurrency Ethereum is seen on a computer screen in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[97766,102,104,103,88646,89397],"class_list":["post-292725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-business-technology","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-banking","tag-tp-ai-artificial-intellgience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}