Writing the Playbook: Anchorage Digital Marks Five Years of Federal Regulation in Crypto Banking

Five years ago, Anchorage Digital became the first crypto company to receive a federal bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). 

When we first got the charter, we did what few believed possible. The consensus was that crypto and federal oversight were like oil and water—and that getting a bank charter meant adapting the traditional finance rules to digital assets would be nearly impossible.

We disagreed. 

For crypto to go institutional, it needed a bank—one regulated at the highest level and built with best-in-class security engineering. If we were actually serious about unlocking institutional access to the digital asset economy, we needed to be federally regulated. We needed to get an OCC charter. 

Our journey started in South Dakota with a state-issued trust charter, building the banking and compliance infrastructure we needed to lay the foundation for the future. Converting from a state to federal charter was the natural next step: leveling up to meet the high compliance standards of the OCC. Getting approved for the charter was one thing, but operating as the first crypto firm under OCC oversight was an entirely different challenge—one we embraced to help establish a path forward for the industry.

It meant submitting to rigorous exams that reviewed every process, every control, and every policy. It meant investing tens of millions to build crypto-native compliance infrastructure from the ground up. It meant hiring top talent and adding board members who had spent careers across government and traditional finance. It meant writing an entirely new playbook for crypto banking. 

The result of the last five years? A bank built to last—and the bank crypto deserved.   

Since getting the charter, Anchorage Digital Bank has added billions in digital assets under custody. Some of the largest institutions in the world have chosen to work with us. We have continued to scale and add new business lines built on top of our federally regulated stack—like our stablecoin issuance platform, Atlas settlement network, and Prime end-to-end offerings. 

Has the charter been good for business? No doubt. But getting the charter was never really just about platform growth. It was a long-term bet that regulatory clarity would drive institutional adoption by creating a safer digital asset ecosystem.   

Nowhere is that foresight clearer than in stablecoins.

When we received our charter in January 2021, stablecoins were already showing early signs of becoming something bigger than a trading tool—but the regulatory framework to support them didn’t yet exist. We believed that stablecoins would become foundational financial infrastructure, and we built with that assumption long before the market caught up.

Today, stablecoins underpin cross-border payments, real-time settlement, and programmable finance at global scale. Anchorage Digital’s role in this evolution isn’t the result of chasing market growth—it’s the product of years of intentional preparation. Our OCC charter positioned us to responsibly issue and support stablecoins under federal oversight, helping bring this innovation on-shore and into the U.S. regulatory perimeter alongside partners like Tether, Western Union, Ethena Labs, and OSL Group.

What makes me optimistic for the future is how others are just now starting to walk the path we pioneered. We might have been the first federally chartered crypto bank, but we never wanted to be the only one. More crypto firms coming under OCC oversight is good for institutions, good for consumers, and good for the ecosystem as a whole. 

Anchorage Digital wrote the playbook over the last five years. Our work has set the standard for digital asset banking and advanced U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins as the next evolution of global capital markets.

The charter is just the starting line. What you build after is what matters.
- Nathan McCauley, Co-Founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital