“Can a federally chartered crypto bank become the definitive regulated financial infrastructure layer for institutional digital asset participation — from custody and trading to stablecoin issuance and collateral-backed lending?”
Founded in 2017 as a crypto custody provider for institutional clients, Anchorage Digital's defining move was obtaining the first OCC-issued federal bank charter for a crypto-native company in 2021 — making it a regulated bank, not just a custodian. This enabled it to expand from pure custody into a full institutional financial stack: trading, staking, governance, collateral-backed lending, interest-bearing USD accounts, SWIFT wires, and stablecoin issuance. The company's current thesis is that being the only federally chartered crypto bank gives it a structural regulatory moat to become the financial infrastructure layer for institutions seeking to participate in digital assets under full regulatory compliance.