Anchorage Digital has announced an integration with Binance to provide off-exchange payments to institutional crypto traders, giving customers access to the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume without giving up control of their assets.
Powered by Anchorage Digital’s payments infrastructure suite, Atlas, this partnership marks the first off-exchange payments implementation within that platform. Under the deal, financial institutions will be able to trade on Binance while their assets remain sequestered at Anchorage Digital Bank, the first federally chartered cryptocurrency bank in the United States.
This structure mirrors how institutional trading works in traditional financial markets, where custody and execution are separated. In these markets, assets are held in a custodian, transferred only upon final settlement, and never appear on the trading venue’s balance sheet. Cryptocurrencies have long lacked that separation, requiring financial institutions to pre-fund exchange accounts and accept counterparty exposure to the exchange itself.
“Financial institutions need a crypto market structure that mirrors the standards they already rely on in traditional finance,” said Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital. Bitcoin Magazine. “Off-exchange payments powered by Atlas is designed to separate custody and execution, helping financial institutions access exchange liquidity while safely storing their assets.”
The arrangement also allows financial institutions to pledge both crypto assets and US dollar accounts as collateral, allowing capital to be deployed while meeting trading margin requirements. This is an approach consistent with traditional financial company workflows.
Over the past few years, Binance has built institutional infrastructure and expanded tri-party banking and collateral management services for professional clients. The integration of Anchorage Digital further extends that effort.
“Our collaboration with Anchorage Digital gives institutional investors a new way to access liquidity on Binance while managing custody and collateral through a model more familiar to traditional financial markets,” said Katherine Chen, Head of VIP and Institutions at Binance.
Adoption of encryption and off-exchange payments
Atlas is designed to support a wide range of organizational workflows beyond off-exchange payments, including trading, lending, collateral management, and other capital markets functions.
Anchorage Digital says the platform is built for the current stage of institutional cryptocurrency adoption, where companies entering the market have compliance, custody, and operational requirements that early crypto infrastructure was not designed to meet.
Anchorage Digital is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, KKR, GIC and Visa and is valued at $4.2 billion.
In addition to Anchorage Digital Bank NA, the company operates through Anchorage Digital Singapore, which has a license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Anchorage Digital NY, which has a BitLicense from the New York Department of Financial Services.
This article, Anchorage Digital and Binance launch off-exchange payments for institutional crypto trades, first appeared in Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Micah Zimmerman.
