Anchorage Digital

Anchorage owns the single hardest-to-replicate asset in US crypto: an OCC national trust charter it has held since 2021, years before rivals began queuing for conditional approvals. That regulatory head start is now converting into the stablecoin era's most valuable franchise — regulated issuance. Anchorage issues USDtb with Ethena, and in January 2026 launched USA₮, Tether's federally regulated, GENIUS Act-native US stablecoin, with Cantor Fitzgerald as reserve custodian and day-one exchange support from Kraken, OKX, and Crypto.com. Tether — the most profitable company per employee in finance — followed with a $100M strategic equity investment in February 2026 at a $4.2B valuation, up from the $3B+ KKR-led Series D mark of December 2021: a rare crypto company whose valuation rose across the cycle. The core custody business compounds alongside: as ETFs, corporates, and banks bring institutional capital on-chain, a federally chartered qualified custodian with staking, settlement, and governance built in is the default counterparty for compliance-constrained allocators. If stablecoins become the dollar's export rail, Anchorage is positioned as the regulated mint — the bank charter everyone else is still applying for, already fully operational.

Anchorage's moat is a license, and licenses are being printed. Coinbase received conditional OCC approval for a national trust charter in April 2026 and Crypto.com followed in February; as the charter path normalizes under a friendly administration, "the only federally chartered crypto bank" stops being a category of one and starts being a crowded field with better-capitalized entrants. The stablecoin strategy carries concentrated counterparty risk: hitching the brand to Tether — an issuer with a long history of regulatory friction — for both USA₮ issuance and a $100M equity stake ties Anchorage's reputation to its most controversial partner, and USA₮'s early circulation (about 17.5 million tokens outstanding at the end of January 2026) is a rounding error against USDC and USDT proper. The June 30, 2026 Open USD consortium is the sharper threat: when Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, BlackRock, and 140+ partners back a shared, zero-fee stablecoin whose reserve yield flows to distribution partners, the economics of per-issuer branded stablecoins — Anchorage's growth thesis — compress structurally. Meanwhile custody fees keep grinding down, the June 2026 crash shrinks fee-bearing assets, and a $4.2B valuation set by a strategic (not a price-discovering financial investor) may flatter the mark.