Cryptocurrency Custodian Anchorage Adds Five More DeFi Tokens

Anchorage is adding five more decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens to its custody vaults, with a focus on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and automated market makers (AMMs), the beating heart of DeFi.

Announced Friday, Anchorage, the first crypto custodian to win a U.S. federal banking charter, is adding support for DeFi tokens 1INCH, BNT, Curve Finance (CRV), REN and SushiSwap (SUSHI).

DeFi investment has grown at an explosive rate with the equivalent of more than $85 billion USD currently locked across Ethereum's DeFi ecosystem at the time of writing. Anchorage pointed out in a blog post that the DeFi universe had grown by more than nine times in value since Anchorage added support for Uniswap, Yearn and others late last year.

“In broad strokes, this is all based on client demand for these tokens,” Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley said in an interview, adding:

“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.”

Read more: DeFi Index Fund Is Bitwise’s Fastest Grower, With $32.5M in 2 Weeks: Hougan

Plus, 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,” McCauley said. “It’s a condition of us having (a) federal bank charter.”