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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.

In 2021, Anchorage Digital made history when the @USOCC granted us a national bank charter to serve as a full-scale digital asset bank, providing custody, trading, settlement, governance, and other regulated services for institutions. pic.twitter.com/sMKwq3tTfv

— Anchorage Digital ⚓ Prime is Live (@Anchorage) August 21, 2025

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.

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Anchorage Digital has moved out from under its U.S. banking regulator’s order that it institute a compliance program to protect against money-laundering abuses, with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announcing the removal of the cease-and-desist order originally issued in 2022.

“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,” it said in the termination announced on Thursday.

Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley, who has emerged as a high-profile representative of crypto interests in Washington, framed the enforcement action as regulatory “feedback” in celebrating its removal.

“We received — and have now resolved — feedback from regulators as we set the standard for federally chartered custody of digital assets,” he said in a Thursday missive on the company’s website, in which he called Anchorage Digital “the world’s most regulated digital asset bank.”

The OCC and other U.S. banking regulators have, since the start of President Donald Trump’s second administration, sought to relax constraints on crypto industry businesses. New OCC chief Jonathan Gould, who was sworn in last month, was an agency veteran who has also worked in the private sector as chief legal officer for Bitfury.

Anchorage Digital was the first crypto bank to win a full-fledged banking charter from the agency that regulates national banks, and after it did so, that window had closed for a time as the regulators during President Joe Biden’s tenure viewed the industry with more suspicion.

More recently, digital assets issuers including Circle, Ripple and Paxos have again started applying to the OCC to start the bank-charter process.

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