Nathan McCauley said something on the latest episode of “From the Block” that should have stopped the conversation cold. It almost did.
“There was one crypto bank, there are now nine, and what I want is 4,000,” the Anchorage Digital co-founder and CEO told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and Citi’s Ryan Rugg. “I want every bank to become a crypto bank.”
Then the kicker: “In a world where there are 4,000 banks, we’re powering 3,999 of them.”
There are roughly 4,000 commercial banks in the United States. McCauley is saying he wants to be the silent infrastructure behind 99.99% of them.
That’s not how founders of category-defining companies usually talk. The standard playbook, especially for a firm that fought eight years for the only federal crypto bank charter in the country, is to defend the moat. Keep competitors out, keep margins high, keep the franchise scarce. McCauley is doing the opposite. He is openly inviting thousands of competitors into the market and betting the company on being the layer underneath them.
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It is, in other words, an AWS strategy applied to crypto banking. McCauley’s bet is that in regulated digital assets, the durable economics live in infrastructure, not in being the brand on the door.
The Crypto Bank Pioneer
When McCauley started Anchorage in 2017, the thesis was almost taxonomic. As Webster summarized it, he looked at cryptocurrency and concluded that crypto needed a bank. That problem has now largely been solved, not just by Anchorage, but by the eight other regulated crypto banks that have emerged behind it, and by the regulatory clarity flowing out of Washington since the GENIUS Act.
So, the moat is closing. McCauley’s response is to reframe the game entirely.
Today, Anchorage is the regulated issuer behind Tether’s U.S. stablecoin, as well as Ethena’s and Western Union’s. It is the custody rail behind BlackRock’s BUIDL. None of those institutions wanted to become a crypto bank themselves; they wanted a regulated counterparty that already was one.
“Whether that’s around stablecoins, whether that’s custody and trading as a back end, whether that’s building their business on top of ours,” McCauley said, “we are here to be the enabling infrastructure bank for the industry.”
The pitch has shifted from “we are the only one who can do this” to “you shouldn’t have to do this yourself.” That says McCauley believes the constraint on cryptocurrency banking is no longer regulatory access—it is operational complexity, and the 3,999 banks that will never want to build it themselves.
If there is a hole in the strategy, it’s the dollar leg. Anchorage can custody, issue and settle digital assets. What it can’t yet do is hold reserves directly at the Federal Reserve.
Webster called the Fed master account “the real prize,” and McCauley did not push back. Anchorage has a Tier 3 application pending. But his framing was telling. The master account is not about prestige; it’s about closing the loop for clients.
“A number of our clients have come to us and just said, ‘Hey, we love the technology. We wish that you guys could be our dollar bank as well,’” McCauley said. Direct Fed access, in his account, would let Anchorage build “safer services” by owning more of the operational and settlement stack, particularly for stablecoin flows, where the dollar reserve and the digital asset currently live in two different places.
Read in the context of the 4,000-banks ambition, the master account is not a flex. It is the last missing component of a vertically integrated stack that other banks can plug into.
The near-term catalyst for all of this is stablecoins, and McCauley thinks the pipeline is about to break open.
He said Anchorage has “in the neighborhood of 20 issuers in the pipeline” wanting to issue through its rails, with demand accelerating after the GENIUS Act clarified the role of OCC trusts in scaled stablecoin issuance. Over the next two to three years, he expects “a Cambrian explosion of stablecoins” with every major institution with a reason to issue (capturing float, controlling user ecosystems, reducing third-party dependence) doing so.
Webster pushed on the obvious question: how many stablecoins can the market actually sustain?
The infrastructure bet is agnostic to which stablecoins win. Anchorage gets paid to issue them, custody them and settle them. That happens whether the brand on the front is Tether, Western Union or a regional bank that does not exist yet.
Rugg, who advises corporates and financial institutions on digital asset strategy at Citi, framed the decision facing every bank in McCauley’s addressable market in classic enterprise terms: build, buy or partner.
“If you can’t [build], and you can’t build that architecture,” Rugg said, “you’re going to have to partner with someone who can.”
Julian Sevillano, a senior advisor at Anchorage who has spent years guiding financial institutions through digital asset strategy, argued that the institutions most likely to succeed are those that extend existing strengths rather than treat crypto as a generic growth lane.
“Play to your strengths,” he said. A global treasury bank should modernize treasury operations. A wealth manager should expand product access. The discipline is to define the business case before chasing the technology: “Who could be my client? What would be the product that I could serve? Do I have the core competencies to do that?”
The consensus was clear: regulation is the unlock. “You need rules and guardrails,” Sevillano said. “You need the right level of supervision and regulation to provide the environment for everybody to be able to operate in a trusted environment.” Rugg added that the regulated entities with the safety, soundness and governance to scale within financial services “may be that unlock.”
The conventional way to read crypto’s current moment is as a contest. Stablecoins versus banks, traditional finance versus DeFi, JPMorgan versus Tether. McCauley’s pitch suggests that framing is already obsolete.
The end state he is describing is not a winner-take-all market. It is an infrastructure layer. In that world, the question for every U.S. bank is not whether to do crypto. It is whether to build it themselves or rent it from the company that already has.
McCauley has a number in mind for how that question gets answered: 3,999 to 1.
