Anchorage Digital

Anchorage Digital offers a crypto-native digital asset platform that provides services such as custody, trading, staking, governance, and financing for large businesses such as publicly traded companies, hedge funds, and banks, to streamline investments via blockchain technology. The platform allows users to trade and stake upto 80 supported crypto assets to earn returns and participate in protocol governance. The company also received a federal banking charter in January 2021. Anchorage reported in December 2021 that it increased the number of clients by 96% and its employee base by 175% in 2021.

In June 2022, Anchorage integrated its custody exchange with Binance US and along with commitments from CoinList, Blockchain.com, Wintermute, and Strix Leviathan, to give institutions direct access to a number of trading pairs across exchanges.

In August 2021, the company began offering blockchain governance voting services beginning with Aave to enable institutions and token holders to use its governance portal to participate in on-chain decisions relating to the Aave lending protocol. The system uses a separate voting key so that digital assets can remain safely in storage without the risk of moving it between wallets.

Key customers and partnerships

Anchorage also allows institutional investors to access USD loans without having to liquidate their ETH holdings through a partnership with BankProv, a US commercial bank. Clients can store their ETH with Anchorage as collateral to borrow USD through BankProv. This product was launched as an addition to Anchorage’s pre-existing Bitcoin-backed loan schemes. Anchorage also allows for the staking of Ethereum for its institutional clients.

The company went on to partner with Bitkub, Dream Trade, FBG Capital, GMO-Z.com Trust Company, IOSG Ventures, and Antalpha in October 2022, to increase its institutional reach within Asia and develop a JPY-denominated stablecoin

Funding and financials

In December 2021, the company raised USD 350 million in a Series D led by KKR with participation from several other investors including Goldman Sachs, Alameda Research, Andreessen Horowitz, and PayPal Ventures. The funds were earmarked for investment in product development as well as increasing the number of features and integrations with DeFi products.