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Anchorage Digital Bank National Association, has obtained conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), making Anchorage the first federally chartered digital asset bank in history, as the cryptocurrency and banking worlds continue to draw closer together
Anchorage disclosed the approval via a statement also posted on its official Twitter handle.
Crypto deserves a bank, and we are immensely proud of being approved as the one to set the standard.
Having a national bank charter places Anchorage Digital Bank firmly on the same regulatory footing as other national banks in the country. Most immediately, it puts first-of-its-kind, sub-custody services within reach for any traditional financial institution that wishes to give its clients access to digital assets” Anchorage stated.
A banking charter would give Anchorage the clear authority to act as a “qualified custodian” for institutional investors under Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules and explicitly allowing it to do business in all 50 states.
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However, Anchorage warned that “holdings of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets are speculative and involve a substantial degree of risk, including the risk of complete loss.
“There can be no assurance that any cryptocurrency, token, coin, or other crypto asset will be viable, liquid, or solvent.
“Digital assets held in custody are not guaranteed by Anchorage Digital Bank National Association and are not FDIC-insured.
Anchorage, headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in Porto, Portugal and Sioux Falls, South Dakota had applied for OCC charter approval in November 2020.
At the time Nathan McCauley, Anchorage’s co-founder and CEO said that “Anchorage is encouraged by the recent positive progress out of the OCC with respect to regulatory clarity around custody of digital assets”
Why now?
Anchorage approval comes at time when the OCC, which has existed since the Civil War, may be unusually receptive to such requests. Brian Brooks, the acting comptroller since May, is a former chief legal officer for the Coinbase exchange and has been notably focused on clearing the way for banks to participate in the crypto market which has drawn so much so that he was recently criticized by lawmakers for spending so much time on this niche during a pandemic.
In 2020 Kraken, a crypto exchange, became the first such business to obtain a U.S. banking license, albeit a special-purpose one from Wyoming (the same kind obtained by digital asset startup Avanti).
By: Ifunanya Ikueze
