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It's not often you see an entire industry go through such a regulatory whipsaw as crypto has in the past year, from an administration bent on destroying it to one that now welcomes it as a national asset. No one knows this better than Nathan McCauley, Cofounder and CEO of Anchorage Digital Bank.
McCauley, who helped found Anchorage in 2017 and has over 700 people reporting to him, got the word in June 2023 that the startup's bank was closing its account in 30 days, a move that was "devastating" and led to a 20 percent workforce layoff at Anchorage, McCauley told the Senate Banking committee in testimony last year.
But that was then. Today, McCauley credits legislation and regulatory policies as the main catalyst for 2025 being an incredible year for financial adoption of blockchain technology.
The main event was passage of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act—the GENIUS Act in shorthand—which for the first time set rules and procedures for who can offer stablecoins: They must be issued by a nationally chartered trust bank, must have reserves audited monthly and can only hold liquid assets like dollars in a bank account or short-term Treasuries.
"2025 was really a story of taking incredible innovation and setting it up for the next phase of growth, where it can grow 10 or 100 times in terms of reach across the entire financial ecosystem," McCauley said in an interview with American Banker. "That's a big unlock."
Anchorage, which became the first federal-chartered digital bank in 2021, announced several large initiatives last year, including the acquisition of Mountain Protocol in May to allow it to integrate stablecoin issuance and infrastructure into its platform; a month later it rolled out what it calls the first federally regulated stablecoin system to allow institutions to create and scale regulated digital dollars. Partners in that effort include Tether, Western Union, OSL Group, and Ethena Labs.
Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer in the world, chose Anchorage to be the issuer of its U.S.-focused stablecoin, USAT. Its mainstay coin, USDT, has traditionally been pitched to investors outside the U.S. but USAT will adhere to the new rules under the GENIUS Act. Tether also invested $100 million Anchorage earlier this year, valuing the digital bank at $4.2 billion.
Anchorage also entered deals with traditional players on Wall Street. It's providing digital asset custody for BlackRock and is both the collateral manager and custodian for Cantor Fitzgerald's Bitcoin financing program. McCauley is also proud of the deal he struck last year with REX Shares to launch the first federally regulated Solana staking ETF.
McCauley said the number one stablecoin in the world deciding to utilize the newly passed GENIUS Act regulations to create a product for the U.S. market that partnered with Anchorage is a testament to what the bank has accomplished.
"The Tether partnership is transformative," he said. "It's incredible validation of the infrastructure we've built."
McCauley said his background in software security was ideal to set himself up in the blockchain ecosystem of 2017. McCauley is named on the patent granted to Square, where he worked from 2011 to 2015, that enabled the first encrypted credit-card reader.
"We are a bank and people view us as a bank, but there's also a real sense that we are, at our absolute core, a security company that has a bank," he said.
Losing access to Anchorage's commercial bank partner in 2023 was one of the hardest challenges the bank has faced. "That was terrible," McCauley said. "That was a really bad day." If another piece of legislation—the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, or CLARITY Act—passes, it could be another tipping point, McCauley said. Yet the CLARITY Act, whose intent is to create market structure rules and regulatory jurisdiction boundaries for crypto, is stalled. Senate progress has been derailed by banking groups' pushback over stablecoin rewards programs.
"Once the Clarity Act passes, every single bank in the country is going to say, 'hey, it's time to adopt digital assets,'" he said. "That's when you really start to get the network effect." It will take time to build the necessary infrastructure for such a shift, McCauley said, but "it's inevitable."
