Digital Bank Anchorage is adding five more decentralized finance tokens to its custody vaults,with a focus on decentralized exchange (DEX) and automated market making (AMM), the beating heart of DeFi.
Announced Friday, Anchorage, the first crypto native custodian to win a U.S. Federal Banking Charter, is adding support for DeFi tokens 1inch (1INCH), Bancor (BNT), Curve Finance (CRV), Ren (REN), and Sushiswap (SUSHI).
DeFi investment has grown at an explosive rate with the equivalent of more than $85 billion USD currently locked across the DeFi ecosystem at time of writing. Anchorage pointed out via a blog post that the DeFi ecosystem had grown by more than nine times in value since the custodian added support for Uniswap, Yearn, and others late last year.
“In broad strokes, this is all based on client demand for these tokens,” said Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley in an interview. “Sometimes it even surprises me how sophisticated people are and how much they’re wanting to go into this. We do custody for the Bitwise DeFi Index, for example, and traditional hedge funds are coming in and wanting to buy these tokens and even to use these networks.”
As well as client demand for certain tokens, the fast-moving experimental nature of DeFi means a firm like Anchorage has to do some serious tire-kicking before adding a project, McCauley said.
“In order to support these assets is to run them through a pretty comprehensive due diligence asset support framework,” said McCauley. “It’s a condition of us having the Federal Bank Charter.”