Anchorage's McCauley: banks don't know their own balances until day's end

GENIUS over CLARITY: why McCauley isn't worried about the stalled bill

Asked whether the failure of the CLARITY Act is a major setback for banks entering crypto, McCauley pushes back on the framing. He says the GENIUS Act already did the heavy lifting by giving stablecoins a legal foundation and, by extension, validating the blockchains and decentralized networks stablecoins depend on. "Most banks their primary business is in movement, settlement and holding of the dollar," he says, and since stablecoins upgrade the dollar into what he calls "a like 10 times better product," banks can no longer ignore the space.

On CLARITY specifically, he argues it "was going to be an accelerant" rather than a precondition. Drawing a parallel to how securities law rolled out across three separate bills over a decade in U.S. history, he expects crypto regulation to similarly arrive in pieces — through rulemaking or more focused legislation — rather than one omnibus bill. "We would have moved a lot faster, but we're still moving at a breakneck pace," he says.

Banks aren't a monolith, and that cuts against the crypto-versus-banks narrative

McCauley rejects the idea that banks act as a unified bloc opposed to crypto's self-custody ethos. He says large banks are really "a bunch of divisions" with different agendas: wealth units want Bitcoin access for clients, payments divisions want stablecoins and tokenized deposits, and lending desks want crypto or tokenized assets as collateral. He adds that the bank lobby sometimes advocates for positions individual banks don't even care about, calling the assumption of one unified bank view "a category error."

He argues bank adoption of blockchain will ultimately reinforce rather than undermine decentralization, since bringing permissioned, KYC/AML-compliant activity on-chain is still "a step in the right direction" toward a more composable financial system.

Anchorage's stack: prime, infrastructure, and enterprise use cases

McCauley breaks Anchorage's business into three verticals. Prime serves clients directly as bank, custodian, trading and staking partner. Financial infrastructure licenses Anchorage's technology to other banks for custody, tokenization, tokenized deposits, and stablecoin issuance — he says this segment is "really been boosted" by this year's institutional adoption wave, with announcements coming on banks using Anchorage for tokenized deposit infrastructure. The third, still developing, is commercial and enterprise use cases such as companies paying international suppliers in stablecoins rather than dollars.

On tokenized deposits specifically — which he acknowledges some guests have called "the least interesting thing happening in crypto" — McCauley says the real value is operational: many banks "don't actually know how much money is in their accounts until the end of the day because all their systems are batch processed." Tokenized deposits give banks wallet and ledger infrastructure that becomes a natural stepping stone to accepting stablecoins or Bitcoin.

Integration is additive, not a rip-and-replace, and multiple winners emerge

McCauley says no institution is ripping out legacy systems; new blockchain rails run as an additive "side car" alongside existing infrastructure, potentially for a decade or more, covering specific use cases like collateral borrowing or tokenized repo before any broader cutover is even considered. He points to NYSE, the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq moving toward what he refers to as "235" settlement as a step toward round-the-clock markets that he sees as only fully achievable on blockchain rails.

Asked who benefits most from what he calls the "tokenization super cycle," McCauley says it's "positive sum" for the industry as a whole, but singles out infrastructure providers, the chains that end up hosting stablecoin settlement, and mature DeFi protocols as particularly well positioned. He does not name a specific winning chain, leaving that question open.

"The biggest winner is the industry at large." — Nathan McCauley