Anchorage, a U.S.-based premier digital asset platform for institutions, announced on Thursday it secured $80 million through its Series C funding round, which was led by GIC with participation from a16z, Blockchain Capital, Lux, and Indico.
Founded in 2017, Anchorage claims it was created to meet the “growing need” for institutional custody that allows investors to safely hold and use digital assets.
“Anchorage offers world class custody, trading, and financing services, as well as on-chain participation like staking and governance. Modular and adaptable to any blockchain use case, Anchorage is designed to meet the evolving financial needs of institutions.”
Anchorage further revealed that the investment round’s funds will be used to rapidly scale to meet the rising demand for participation in the digital asset space, particularly among corporations and traditional financial institutions. The platform noted that in the next few months, it will do the following:
- Offer at-launch support for new protocols: Anchorage will continue to invest in broad asset support, as well as the kind of at-launch support we have provided for protocols like Celo, Filecoin, and Oasis.
- Support emerging corporate use cases: Anchorage is committed to supporting organizations looking to participate in the digital asset space, from supporting corporate treasuries, to finding strategic ways to incorporate crypto into their operations
- Make crypto lending seamless and secure: Anchorage plans to scale its lending product and operations, diversifying loan types and giving lenders a truly seamless and secure lending experience
- Be a crypto partner to neo banks, challenger banks, and traditional banks: Anchorage is committed to partnering with a wide range of financial institutions to make it easy and secure to offer crypto services
- Make institutional DeFi participation accessible: Anchorage has been an early proponent of DeFi, offering custody support for many DeFi tokens, bringing wrapped layer-one protocols to Ethereum, and supporting Bitwise in the launch of the first DeFi crypto index fund. In the coming years, Anchorage is seeking to facilitating greater institutional participation in the space
Anchorage went on to add:
“At Anchorage, our focus has always been enabling institutions to participate in the digital asset space. At first, participation meant secure custody you can use. It has since grown to mean a wide range of crypto-native financial products and services, from staking and governance, to financing and lending, to trading and DeFi. 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.”