OCC Cites ‘Safety and Soundness’ for Crypto Bank Anchorage in Pulling Consent Order

In brief

The OCC terminated its consent order on digital assets bank Anchorage Digital.
The regulator brought the order in 2022 after granting conditional approval to Anchorage in 2021.
Federally chartered Anchorage custodies some of the BTC and ETH held in BlackRock’s spot ETFs.

The Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC) announced Thursday that it has terminated its cease and desist consent order against Anchorage Digital.

The regulator first issued a consent order to Anchorage, a federally chartered digital asset bank, in 2022 due to its “failure to adopt and implement a compliance program” that satisfactorily covered the Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements.

“The OCC believes that the safety and soundness of the bank and its compliance with laws and regulations does not require the continued existence of the order,” the termination order reads.

Anchorage Digital received conditional approval from the OCC in 2021, allowing it to offer crypto custody services to its customers and making it the first federally chartered bank to custody digital assets. After demonstrating the appropriate compliance, the consent order has now been terminated.

“When we applied for that charter, we knew what we were signing up for: the path forward was uncharted for any crypto company, and at the time, many in our industry—and most of Washington—felt that digital assets and regulation were like oil and water,” said Anchorage co-founder and CEO Nathan McCauley in a statement Thursday.

“We embarked on that path not because it was easy, but because we knew it was the right long-term move for the industry—laying the foundation for trust, safety, and durability in the years ahead,” he added. “And in an industry intent on ‘going to the moon,’ the seeming impossibility of our federal charter mission lit a fire under us from the start.”

The South Dakota-based firm specializes in custody, staking, trading, and governance for its members. In April, BlackRock chose Anchorage to custody some of the Bitcoin and Ethereum held for the asset manager’s industry-leading spot ETFs.

In May, the OCC affirmed that national banks it oversees can buy, sell, and manage any crypto assets in their custody. Since that time, stablecoin issuer Circle as well as Ripple and Paxos have applied for charters that would make them nationally regulated banks.