Anchorage's Custody Advantage

Anchorage’s edge is not just regulation, it is incentive alignment. A pension, ETF issuer, or bank can park assets with a federally chartered custodian whose business is safekeeping, staking, and settlement, instead of wondering whether the same venue is also trying to win order flow. That matters in crypto because exchange operators make money from trading activity, while a pure custody platform is judged on controls, segregation, and operational reliability.

• Anchorage became the first federally chartered crypto bank in January 2021, when the OCC conditionally approved its conversion to Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A. That gave institutions a bank supervised under the federal banking system, with explicit capital, liquidity, and risk management expectations.
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• Gemini combines exchange and custody. Its institutional offering links Gemini Custody to Gemini Exchange through Instant Trade, so clients can trade assets held in cold storage without moving them out first. That is useful, but it also means custody sits inside a broader trading platform rather than apart from it.
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• Fireblocks and BitGo sit closer to infrastructure middleware. Fireblocks sells MPC based wallet, policy, and network software to more than 2,000 institutions, while BitGo markets qualified custody that lets institutions trade, stake, and settle from custody. Both can plug into banks, ETFs, and fintech workflows without needing to own the full exchange relationship Gemini does.
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The market is moving toward separation between where assets are stored and where they trade. That favors specialists like Anchorage for institutions that want a neutral vault, and it pushes exchange led firms like Gemini to prove that bundled custody plus execution is worth the extra complexity. Over time, custody looks more like regulated infrastructure, while trading becomes a separate layer on top.