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About Anchorage
Anchorage Digital is the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, supervised by the OCC, and provides institutions with custody governed by a federal banking framework. It addresses the fact that institutional funds cannot meet bankruptcy-remote, auditable and compliant standards through self-custody or exchange custody, while traditional custodians struggle to cover on-chain assets. Its custody architecture rests on segregated accounts, policy-based approvals and cold storage that settles without hot wallets, plus an Atlas settlement network for direct counterparty delivery, with staking and institutional-grade Custody layered on top.
The trade-off is that service is restricted to qualified institutions and professional investors rather than retail self-custody users, and its business perimeter is set by the banking regulatory framework. Compliance and bankruptcy remoteness form the moat but also constrain product flexibility and reachable market, while supported asset classes are bounded by both on-chain availability and regulatory permission.
In 2017, Diogo Mónica and Nathan McCauley founded Anchorage in San Francisco, focused on institutional-grade crypto custody.
On January 13, 2021, Anchorage Digital Bank won OCC approval as the first federally chartered crypto bank in the U.S.
In December 2021, Anchorage closed a $350M Series D led by KKR at a valuation above $3B.
In 2024, after spot BTC and ETH ETFs were approved, Anchorage was chosen as custodian by BlackRock, Grayscale and others.
In September 2025, Anchorage and Tether announced a U.S. stablecoin, USAT.
In 2025, Anchorage reportedly planned a 2027 IPO, entering a scaling phase.
In February 2026 Tether invested $100 million in Anchorage Digital, lifting its valuation to $4.2 billion; using its federal charter the bank issues stablecoins and during the year provided issuance, reserve custody and compliance support for five stablecoins including USDtb and USA₮. On the first anniversary of the GENIUS Act in July, the company publicly urged Congress to pass the CLARITY Act.
On October 6 it announced the acquisition of payment orchestration firm Routable, which now operates as Routable by Anchorage Digital, with stablecoin and tokenized deposit settlement to be added over coming quarters; on October 20 it partnered with Securitize so the platform can mint and redeem stablecoins directly with Anchorage Digital Bank, which also handles custody and settlement. From September 29 it provided day-one institutional custody for Puffer UniFi, and it added custody for Tempo-native assets including OUSD, USDT0, USDC.e and pathUSD, with TIP-20 support to follow.
Anchorage has made itself the issuing-licence layer for stablecoins: Tether's USA₮, Western Union's USDPT, Ethena's USDtb and OSL's USDGO are all issued by the federally chartered bank with reserves in its custody, leaving brand and distribution to clients while it earns on issuance, reserve management and compliance. That white-label route is lighter than an own-brand coin and makes it the required on-ramp for offshore issuers entering the US once GENIUS takes effect; May's interest-bearing dollar accounts and Agentic Banking, plus the Google Cloud partnership, pull accounts and AI-agent payments onto the same bank ledger. October's Routable deal adds ERP-to-rail orchestration across 220 countries and more than a million payees, closing custody and payments under one charter.
Anchorage Digital was founded in 2017 by Nathan McCauley and Diogo Mónica. McCauley is CEO, a security engineer who did penetration testing and security architecture at Square and Matasano Security, holds several key management patents, and sets hiring and engineering standards. Mónica is co-founder and executive chairman; he studied electrical engineering in Lisbon, did distributed systems research in the US, was head of security at Docker, and has been a Haun Ventures partner since 2023.
COO Aaron Schnarch was previously CEO of Coinbase Custody and built out custody operations and client onboarding, with operations and compliance reporting to him. General counsel TuongVy Le came from the SEC and the Treasury and handles policy and legal affairs. Custody, staking and trading each have a lead reporting to McCauley.
Anchorage Digital holds a US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) national bank charter (January 2021, the first federally chartered crypto bank), a New York BitLicense, and a Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Major Payment Institution licence.