In brief
- Anchorage Digital expanded a custody-and-listing arrangement with Bitso covering both sides of the US-Mexico corridor.
- The deal targets the US-Mexico remittance corridor, one of the world’s largest, which moves tens of billions yearly.
- It extends a Latin America stablecoin race, including Circle’s recent Colombia settlement pilot.
Anchorage Digital is planting itself at the center of one of the world’s largest money-transfer routes, expanding a custody-and-listing arrangement with Latin American crypto platform Bitso to hold the stablecoins moving between the United States and Mexico.
Announced Tuesday, the deal puts Anchorage Digital Bank’s custody beneath both sides of the corridor. MXNB, Bitso’s Mexican peso stablecoin, is now custodied by the federally chartered crypto bank across six blockchains: Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Arc.
In turn, Bitso has listed USDPT and USAT, the U.S. dollar stablecoins from Western Union and Tether, both of which Anchorage issues and custodies. The companies did not disclose financial terms.
The target is the U.S.-Mexico remittance corridor, which moves tens of billions of dollars a year and ranks among the biggest cross-border payment flows on earth. Much of that money still travels over correspondent banking, wire transfers and cash-pickup networks that are slow and costly, while about 15% already runs through Bitso’s infrastructure.
→Anchorage is betting that stablecoins, which settle onchain in seconds around the clock, will increasingly replace those legacy rails, and that doing so requires custody that is regulated and sits wherever the liquidity is.
“The US-Mexico corridor is where stablecoins stop being a thesis and start moving real money at scale,” said Nathan McCauley, Anchorage’s CEO and co-founder, arguing the firm is now “the institutional custody layer on both sides of that flow.” Ben Reid, Bitso’s head of stablecoin, said clients can now access the full dollar-peso corridor fully onchain, backed by a federally chartered bank.
The move extends a broader race to wire stablecoins into Latin America’s payments plumbing. Circle recently pushed deeper into the region with a USDC settlement pilot in Colombia, part of a wider expansion into dozens of emerging markets as stablecoins go mainstream.
For Anchorage, the deal builds on its deepening stablecoin footprint. The bank issues Tether’s U.S.-regulated USAT stablecoin, while Bitso has been pushing its MXNB peso coin across networks like Arbitrum. By anchoring both ends of the corridor, Anchorage is aiming to become the default custodian for any issuer or bank entering the route.
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