Share
Anchorage Digital, the only federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, launched tokenized deposit infrastructure on June 22 designed to let commercial banks offer 24/7 payments and settlement using blockchain technology without replacing their existing core banking systems.
The product works by creating a blockchain-based representation of a customer’s deposit while the underlying funds remain within the bank’s traditional deposit accounts. Anchorage provides the blockchain layer, wallet management, and smart contract execution.
The bank retains the customer relationship, the deposit, and the regulatory obligations associated with it. No core system replacement is required, which removes the primary operational barrier that has kept most banks watching tokenization from the sidelines.
“Many of the banks we are starting to work with are thinking about tokenized deposits and how to begin doing them,” said Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley.
Today, Anchorage Digital is giving banks a new solution. With Tokenized Deposits, banks can use blockchain as a parallel ledger, upgrading bank’s capabilities without replacing what already works.
Tokenized Deposits allow banks a few key capabilities:
– Always-On Settlement:… https://t.co/9ZCemS2etY
— Nathan McCauley ⚓ (@nathanmccauley) June 22, 2026
The distinction from competing infrastructure is structural rather than technical. Fireblocks provides wallet infrastructure and tokenization tooling as a technology vendor operating under no banking charter, meaning a bank that builds on Fireblocks still requires a separate regulated custodian and counterparty for each transaction.
Fireblocks’ strength is developer flexibility and breadth of chain support. Its limitation is that it sits outside the regulated bank perimeter entirely.
Fnality operates as a consortium model, with member banks pooling liquidity into a shared payment system backed by central bank reserves. Its utility is interbank settlement within the consortium rather than a bank issuing its own tokenized deposit to retail or corporate clients. Fnality also remains live only in sterling, with dollar and euro systems still in development.
Anchorage’s platform is neither a technology toolkit nor a consortium. Because Anchorage Digital Bank N.A. holds an OCC charter, it functions as a regulated counterparty and qualified custodian inside every transaction it supports. A bank issuing tokenized deposits through Anchorage settles against a federally chartered institution, not a fintech vendor, and does so within a legal framework that a Fireblocks integration or Fnality membership cannot replicate.
The launch arrives as the debate between stablecoins and tokenized deposits intensifies across wholesale finance. Stablecoins are issued by private companies, backed by Treasuries or cash equivalents, and operate outside the deposit insurance framework. Tokenized deposits are digital representations of commercial bank money that remain within the banking system and carry the same regulatory treatment as the underlying deposit.
The BCG and Anchorage joint report published in June 2026 identified tokenized deposits as the instrument most likely to capture interbank and corporate settlement use cases, particularly for banks that face disintermediation risk from stablecoin issuers but cannot transition their clients to privately issued instruments without regulatory risk.
Anchorage already serves as sole stablecoin custodian and issuer for Tether’s USAT, Western Union’s USDPT, Ethena Labs’ USDtb, and OSL’s USDGO. The tokenized deposit platform extends that infrastructure from stablecoin issuance into the deposit layer of traditional banking, giving Anchorage a position across both sides of the stablecoin versus tokenized deposit debate simultaneously.
Share
preferred on
