As Head of Global Operations at Anchorage Digital, I often think about this forthcoming change through two different experiences but ultimately come to the same conclusion. Anchorage Digital is home to America’s first federally chartered digital asset bank and the first federal stablecoin issuer. And as a former national bank examiner at the OCC with about a decade of experience supervising America’s traditional banks I’ve learned the same lesson: a wider federal regulatory perimeter makes America stronger.
Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A. is proof of that lesson. Yet despite having helped widen that perimeter by pioneering federally-regulated crypto banking that complies with our country’s laws, nationally-chartered banks like ours are also boxed out of it, unable to access the Federal Reserve’s payment rails directly, because of the way master account access has been administered, not by real legal limitations. Therefore we rely on partner banks to touch dollars we already are authorized to move. Frameworks that require a federally regulated bank to use another bank just to move certain funds adds unnecessary risk and inefficiency to our financial system.
This broken system has burned us once before. Anchorage Digital Bank was debanked in 2023 by a bank partner of two years, on 30 days’ notice. We didn’t know if we were going to make payroll. Clients couldn’t wire funds into their accounts. In short, debanking almost wrecked us.
