The lede: For a century, banking access ran through one door: get a state or national charter, join the Fed system, get a master account, settle on Fedwire same-day. Crypto-adjacent firms have been stuck outside that door, forced to rent settlement speed from correspondent banks at a markup. That's now cracking open — unevenly. In March 2026, the Kansas City Fed granted Kraken's banking arm a "skinny" master account: direct Fedwire access, but zero interest on reserves and no discount window. Days later, Custodia Bank's parallel fight for a full account got bounced to a Tenth Circuit denial and is now headed toward a Supreme Court cert petition. Meanwhile the OCC — a separate regulator with a lower bar — has been waving crypto firms through national trust charters (Circle's "First National Digital Currency Bank" got conditional approval in December 2025). Two agencies, two doors, two very different prizes. The one that matters most for balance-sheet economics is the Fed master account, because the GENIUS Act bans stablecoin issuers from paying interest on the coin itself — meaning the spread between reserve yield and zero-cost liabilities is the entire business, and who touches that reserve cash first, and how cheaply it settles, decides who keeps the spread.