With this collaboration, Lydian has onboarded to Anchorage stablecoin minting and redemption, with digital assets custodied with the bank, the companies said Tuesday (Nov. 10).
“Stablecoins reach everyday commerce when the providers merchants already use can accept them, and those providers need a regulated bank in the middle of the flow,” Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.
“Lydian is building the acceptance layer for stablecoin payments at the point of sale and bringing it to merchants of every size.”
Offering the minting, redemption, custody, and settlement infrastructure “behind that is exactly the role a federally chartered crypto bank should play,” he added.
The release noted that Lydian develops the “acceptance layer” that payment and point-of-sale providers plug into so their merchants can accept stablecoins at checkout.
“A customer pays from any digital wallet, in any supported stablecoin or digital asset, and the merchant receives local currency the same way they would from a card, with no need to hold or manage digital assets themselves,” the companies said.
Anchorage helps uphold that merchant experience. Lydian uses the bank to mint stablecoins from fiat and redeem them back to fiat, with assets kept in institutional custody at a federally chartered bank with segregated accounts and audited controls, the release said.
Carl Grimstad, Lydian’s CEO, said that while the debate around stablecoins has long focused on market needs, that is only half the battle.
“The other half is whether merchants at the last mile can offer stablecoins as a payment option,” he added. “Small merchants especially have always been forced to pay more and receive less when it comes to payments, and that’s something we’ve been trying to change.”
PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster spoke with Anchorage’s McCauley earlier this year for the “From the Block” podcast, a conversation that explored the bank’s issuance/custody arrangements with companies like Tether and Western Union.
None of those firms wanted to become a crypto bank, but a regulated counterparty that already was one, that report said.
“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 gone from “we are the only one who can do this” to “you shouldn’t have to do this yourself,” he added.
