Crypto custodian and banking company Anchorage has raised $80 million in a series C funding round, which was led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. Other participants in the round included a16z, Blockchain Capital, Lux, and Indico.
Anchorage aims to use the new capital to scale to meet rising demand for participation in the digital asset space. The firm noted a surge in demand, particularly among corporations, and traditional financial institutions. This new round of funding will allow Anchorage to help institutions participate in “new ways — by bringing crypto to their users.” Especially, by diversifying their corporate treasuries, and by “enabling a wide range of emerging use cases.”
Anchorage co-founders Diogo Mónica and Nathan McCauley said in a release shared with AMBCrypto:
Today, with banks and corporations seeking exposure to the space for themselves and for their customers, we expect the meaning of participation to expand once again.
The team at Anchorage stressed that the firm has always focused on enabling institutions to participate in the crypto asset space.
They found that at first, such participation translated to secure custody that clients could use. However, this has since grown to mean a wide range of crypto-native financial products and services, such as staking and governance, to financing and lending, trading and DeFi.
The firm happens to be one of the first crypto-native companies to receive a federal banking charter from United States OCC.
In the coming months, Anchorage team expects to offer at-launch support for new protocols and support emerging corporate use cases, among others.
The firm intends to offer custody support for DeFi tokens, bringing wrapped layer-one protocols to Ethereum, and supporting Bitwise in the launch of the first DeFi crypto index fund.
