cryptocurrency custodian Anchorage announced that the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC) has conditionally approved its national trust license application, making its subsidiary Anchorage Digital Bank the first federally licensed digital asset in the United States bank.

The OCC explained in the statement that it “conditionally approve”, stating that “OCC granted the company a national trust bank license after a comprehensive review of Anchorage and its current operations. As a mandatory condition of approval, the company signed an operation Agreement, which specifies capital and liquidity requirements and OCC’s expectations for risk management."

According to Anchorage, Anchorage Digital Bank will follow the same regulatory rules as other national banks in the country. "The most direct thing is that it can provide custody services for traditional financial institutions that want to provide customers with access to digital assets."

"Prior to this, mature financial technology companies have handled digital assets safely under the regulatory structure of some states, and some federally chartered banks have sound regulatory frameworks, but they lacked amazing innovations in the blockchain field. The real technical knowledge required to operate at speed. Anchorage Digital Bank is the first entity with both encryption technology and regulatory clarity, which is exactly what institutions need to participate in the cryptocurrency market."

Anchorage Digital Bank, formerly Anchorage's custodial subsidiary (Anchorage Trust Company), applied to OCC in November 2020, hoping to transform into an independent National Bank (National Bank). In addition to Anchorage, BitPay, an encrypted payment processing platform, and Paxos, an encrypted asset service provider, also hope to obtain a National Trust Bank license. Both of them applied to the OCC in December 2020.

It is worth noting that in addition to the progress of the subsidiary's national trust license, Anchorage itself has also recently launched two new assets in conjunction with the securities token platform Tokensoft: wCELO and wCUSD. In October last year, the two announced the joint launch of the mortgage version of the synthetic asset issuance service "Wrapped", saying that they hope to introduce cryptocurrency assets into the Ethereum network, and subsequently issue WZEC and wFIL.

Public information shows that Anchorage is favored by capital. It not only has the support of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalist A16z, but also attracts well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Max Levchin, serial entrepreneur Elad Gil, asset management company BlackRock executive Mark McCombe, and AngelList CEO Individual investors such as Naval Ravikant injected capital.

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