Anchorage, a digital asset custodian solution for institutional investors, has officially launched – after completing a $17 million funding round led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz.
Custody Solution That Allows Users To Stake Assets
Max Levchin, the co-founder of PayPal and former Yahoo board member, also participated in Anchorage’s multi-million dollar founding round through his SciFi VC firm. Other notable investors in the digital asset custodian solution included Mark McCombe, the managing director (for Americas region) at BlackRock, an American investment management firm.
According to Anchorage’s developers, the new cryptoasset custodian was designed to be more secure than existing cold storage solutions for digital currencies. As mentioned in the announcement, the Anchorage platform has been developed specifically for institutional investors and it allows users to “capture yield from staking and inflation.”
The developers of Anchorage pointed out that “investors have been constrained by the limitations of ‘cold storage’ custody.” Existing offline storage devices for cryptoassets are also “vulnerable to human error”, Anchorage’s developers noted.
Providing Asset Security & “Productivity”
In order address these issues, the Anchorage platform aims to allow users to engage in the same types of economic activities that are accessible when storing digital assets in hot wallets (those that are connected to the internet). These activities include “voting”, “auditing proof of existence”, and “fast transactions.”
Notably, Anchorage’s design team mentioned that institutions have been “eager to invest in digital assets”, however “they’ve had to face a trade-off between security and asset productivity.” Backed by investments from billionaire AngelList co-founder, Naval Ravikant, the Anchorage storage platform brings additional functionality as it is reportedly based on a custody model that “enables active on-chain participation.”
By offering what they claim is a better way to store cryptoassets, Anchorage’s development team believes their platform will help in “bringing new growth” to the blockchain and crypto industry. Institutional clients are looking for “usable and trustworthy” solutions for storing their digital assets, the announcement stated.
Allowing Users To Easily Spend Their Cryptoassets
On Monday (January 21st), the SBI Group, a Japanese financial services company that launched (last year) the first bank-owned cryptocurrency exchange, revealed it had invested $15 million in Tangem, a Swiss developer of “smart physical banknotes” for digital currencies.
The banknotes basically function as hardware wallets for cryptoassets, but they can also be used like a bank-issued debit card. Tangem’s smart banknotes may be used to conduct off-chain transactions after depositing digital currency onto the device through an NFC-enabled smartphone.
