Anchorage Digital & BCG: A Strategic Playbook for Banks in the Digital Asset Era

New Anchorage Digital x Boston Consulting Group report offers a strategic playbook for banks navigating digital assets, stablecoins, and tokenization.

The question facing every bank today is no longer whether digital assets matter. It's where to play, how to sequence, and who to trust to execute.

To help financial institutions answer those questions, Anchorage Digital partnered with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) on a first-of-its-kind report: Digital Assets: A Strategic Playbook for Banks. The report frames where banks should participate, partner, integrate, or monitor as the digital asset landscape moves from experimentation to scale.

The findings are unambiguous: digital assets and tokenization have significant potential for value creation for banks through new revenue pools, efficiency opportunities, and defense against competition.

Four Areas Banks Must Address

Anchorage Digital and BCG identified four strategic opportunity areas that banks should develop and execute against, each at a different stage of maturity, and each requiring a different posture:

1. Crypto Brokerage & Crypto-Backed Lending: Crypto brokerage and crypto-backed lending are high-value, near-term revenue opportunities for banks, with crypto trading generating an estimated $30–60B annually. Participation also serves a strategic defense function, protecting wallet share as clients increasingly seek integrated crypto access from their primary bank.
2. Tokenized Money: Stablecoins, Tokenized Deposits & CBDCs: Stablecoins have reached ~$300B in outstanding value and are becoming the preferred settlement asset across institutional and DeFi markets, offering programmability and 24/7 availability that traditional rails cannot match. Tokenized deposits extend these benefits into a familiar instrument, unlocking automation and efficiency gains for corporate and institutional clients.
3. Tokenized Funds: Tokenized money market funds are seeing significant growth by combining familiar regulated fund structures with on-chain utility, while crypto ETFs are expanding access for retail and wealth clients through traditional brokerage channels.
4. Tokenized Real-World Assets: Tokenized equities, bonds, commodities, and private credit are still small relative to traditional markets, but momentum is accelerating as major infrastructure providers enter the space and regulatory clarity emerges globally.

The Case for Action is Now

The digital assets landscape has reached an inflection point, with significant policy and regulatory developments, including the GENIUS Act and OCC rules in the U.S., maturing technology infrastructure, and growing adoption across wealth and institutional client segments. The next one to two years may be a structurally unique window in which incumbent banks can define their position in digital asset value chains.

The report is direct: those institutions that act early, align their digital assets strategy to their business model, and build capabilities ahead of wider market maturation stand to potentially gain significant advantages and market share as the financial system moves toward native integration of digital assets and blockchain infrastructure.

"What separates this moment from prior cycles is that the regulatory foundation is finally in place. Banks no longer need to choose between innovation and compliance, the right partner gives them both. That is exactly what Anchorage Digital has spent nearly a decade building." — Nathan McCauley, CEO & Co-Founder, Anchorage Digital

Anchorage Digital: End-to-End, Across the Stack

Anchorage Digital is the regulated, federally chartered infrastructure platform built specifically for the moment this report describes.

That regulatory foundation underpins our core banking capabilities: staking, settlement, custody, financing, stablecoin issuance and infrastructure, and tokenized asset services, and anchors the broader Anchorage Digital platform through which institutions can access a full suite of digital asset services, including trading, through a single relationship. One partner, one platform.

• Crypto brokerage and lending: Anchorage Digital provides banks with institutional-grade custody, trading, and settlement infrastructure, enabling them to offer crypto brokerage services to their clients with the regulatory clarity and security that bank-grade standards demand.
• Tokenized money: Anchorage Digital is the first federally chartered bank to issue stablecoins under direct OCC supervision, and our track record speaks for itself. Anchorage Digital has been selected as the sole stablecoin issuer for Tether (USAT), Western Union (USDPT), Ethena Labs (USDtb), and OSL (USDGO); some of the world's most recognized institutions chose us as their regulated partner. Beyond issuance, Anchorage Digital's Stablecoin Solutions for Banks offering consolidates stablecoin minting and redemption, custody, fiat treasury management, and settlement into one integrated offering, enabling foreign banks to access 24/7 USD settlement without prefunding, under the same federal charter.
• Tokenized funds and RWAs: Anchorage Digital provides the custody, transfer, and settlement infrastructure for tokenized securities, tokenized money market funds, and real-world assets, giving banks a single regulated counterparty as the on-chain economy scales.

Partner Where You Don't Have Advantage

One of the report's central findings on capability-building is clear: most banks should consider partnering for core digital-asset-native capabilities such as private key custody and security technology, wallet management, smart contracts, and orchestration. That is precisely the role Anchorage Digital was built for as a crypto-native infrastructure layer that lets banks move faster, with greater confidence, and without the risk of building capabilities that are better sourced from a partner with a five-year head start operating under federal oversight.

The Window Is Open. But Not Forever.

Early movers will capture outsized market share, client primacy, and competitive advantage. Institutions that hesitate risk disintermediation, losing clients, revenue, and relevance to faster-moving competitors.

The institutions that move first won't just win market share. They'll set the terms.

To speak with our stablecoin issuance team, contact: stablecoins@anchoragedigital.com or get in touch.