Citing economic, market and regulatory "headwinds" the federally chartered U.S. crypto platform laid off 75 employees.
Listen to the CoinMarketRecap podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts
The first federally chartered crypto platform announced that it would lay off 20% of its staff.
Anchorage Digital said on March 14 that it would reduce its headcount by 75 as part of a "strategic realignment."
Tuesday's announcement comes on the heels of the collapse of three of the largest crypto banks in the U.S. Last week, Silvergate announced "orderly wind down of bank operations and a voluntary liquidation of the bank."
Then California regulators shuttered Silicon Valley Bank after a bank run, and New York's Department of Financial Services did the same to Signature Bank over the weekend. Both were turned over to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, with authorities and even President Joe Biden promising that customers would not lose any assets, although bank investors would be wiped out.
Anchorage said that its "long-term vision" of "building an enduring financial institution for the digital economy … requires us to adjust to changing economic, marketplace, and regulatory conditions."
While there is a "heightened demand" for the products and services it provides for digital assets, those "macroeconomic, market, and regulatory dynamics are creating headwinds for our business and the crypto industry."
Older Headwinds
Anchorage won conditional approval of its South Dakota trust charter to become Anchorage Digital Bank, National Association, in January 2021.
The road hasn't been entirely smooth, however. For one thing, it still has a conditional charter.
Last April, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the federal bank regulator that issues trust, charters and banking licenses, issued a consent decree against Anchorage Digital Bank.
The cause was its "failure to adopt and implement a compliance program that adequately covers the required Bank Secrecy Act/anti-money laundering (BSA/AML) program elements."
That came under the regime of the current Comptroller of the Currency, Michael Hsu, who walked back much of the pro-crypto policies the OCC created under his predecessor, Brian Brooks. He came to the OCC from his previous position as Coinbase's chief legal officer.
The OCC had been aggressively pushing mainstream banks to avoid entanglements with crypto under Hsu long before the collapse of the three banks this past week.
