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The Blockchain Association filed an amicus brief with the US Supreme Court on August 13, 2026, supporting Custodia Bank’s bid to force a reckoning over one of the most consequential banking disputes in the digital asset era.
At its core, the case asks a simple question with enormous consequences: can the Federal Reserve simply decide which eligible banks get access to the payment rails that move trillions of dollars every day, or does federal law limit that discretion?
How Custodia ended up at the Supreme Court’s door
Custodia Bank, a Wyoming-chartered special purpose depository institution, applied for a Fed master account in October 2020. The application sat for over two years before the Kansas City Federal Reserve denied it in January 2023, citing risks tied to Custodia’s digital asset business model.
A master account is not a luxury. It is the gateway to Fedwire and the Automated Clearing House network, the plumbing through which trillions of dollars flow daily. Without one, a bank must route everything through a correspondent bank, adding cost and counterparty risk at every step.
Custodia challenged the denial in court and lost. The US District Court sided with the Fed, and a rehearing request was denied in March 2026. Custodia then petitioned the Supreme Court on July 10-11, 2026, asking it to review whether the Fed’s discretion in these matters is actually as unlimited as the lower courts concluded.
The Blockchain Association’s amicus brief, filed under docket 26-62, argues it is not. The group contends that the Monetary Control Act of 1980 requires Federal Reserve services to be available to eligible depository institutions, and that treating eligibility as a suggestion rather than a guarantee contradicts the statute’s plain meaning.
Why this is bigger than one bank’s account application
The Blockchain Association’s brief frames the Fed’s denial not as a one-off risk assessment but as a template for systematic exclusion. If the central bank can deny master accounts at its own discretion, with courts deferring to that judgment, then any state-chartered bank serving an industry the Fed views unfavorably faces the same wall.
The Kansas City Federal Reserve was granted an extension until September 11, 2026, to respond to the amicus brief, meaning the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to take the case will come sometime after that deadline.
What’s at stake for digital asset firms
This case does not involve crypto tokens, digital asset transfers, or any blockchain transaction. The dispute is purely about regulatory access to conventional payment infrastructure.
State-chartered banks willing to serve crypto companies are a scarce resource. Silvergate and Signature, the two banks that most aggressively served the digital asset sector, both collapsed in 2023.
Congress has been working through stablecoin legislation and a broader digital asset market structure framework, both of which assume that crypto-adjacent banks will have some functional path to payment system access.
The Supreme Court has not yet indicated whether it will take the case. If it does, the decision would resolve a question that lower courts have answered inconsistently and that Congress has never addressed directly: whether the Federal Reserve’s access to the payment system is a right for eligible banks or a privilege the central bank can extend or withhold at its own judgment.
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