Anchorage Digital is an American digital asset platform founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It is best known as the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, having received a national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in January 2021. The company's core business is providing institutional-grade custody, staking, trading, settlement, and governance services to banks, hedge funds, family offices, and other regulated entities.
Anchorage Digital has raised over $490 million in venture funding. Its Series D round in December 2021 – led by KKR and joined by Goldman Sachs, a16z, and GIC (Singapore's sovereign wealth fund) – valued the company at approximately $3 billion. While Anchorage is primarily a financial infrastructure provider, it has made a limited number of strategic investments in companies adjacent to its custody and institutional services business.
Notable investments
Public information on Anchorage Digital's investment portfolio is limited. The company has disclosed few formal investment positions, and its seven known portfolio entries reflect strategic stakes rather than a dedicated venture fund. The investments are concentrated in companies working on institutional crypto infrastructure, lending, compliance, and tokenization. Specific deal sizes and individual portfolio names have not been widely disclosed in public filings or press releases as of mid-2026.
Team
- Nathan McCauley – Co-founder and CEO. Previously Director of Security Engineering at Square (now Block), where he worked on payments security infrastructure.
- Diogo Mónica – Co-founder and President. Previously Director of Security at Square. His background is in distributed systems and cryptographic security. He also served on the board of Docker.
Both founders built Anchorage around the thesis that institutional adoption of digital assets required a custody model as secure and compliant as traditional banking – not a software wallet.
Recent activity
In 2023 and 2024, Anchorage Digital expanded its product surface to include bitcoin ETF custody partnerships, positioning itself ahead of the January 2024 spot bitcoin ETF approvals in the United States. The company was named as a custodian for several ETF issuers exploring regulated custody arrangements. In 2024, Anchorage also launched tokenized asset custody services, supporting institutions experimenting with on-chain representation of real-world assets.
The company has faced regulatory scrutiny alongside peers. In 2022, it received a cease-and-desist from the OCC related to deficiencies in its Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering compliance program – a notable challenge for the company that had presented itself as the gold standard for regulated crypto banking. Anchorage subsequently invested in strengthening its compliance infrastructure and the OCC matter was reportedly addressed.
Anchorage Digital's position as a federally chartered bank gives it a structural advantage as regulatory clarity in the United States matures. Its geographic focus is the United States, though it also maintains an engineering presence in Porto, Portugal. With institutional demand for compliant crypto custody growing – driven by ETF inflows and bank-issued tokenization projects – Anchorage is well-placed as a back-end infrastructure provider. Its investment activity is likely to remain selective and tied to companies that extend its core custody and compliance value proposition rather than broad venture-style bets.
