The only federally chartered crypto bank in the US now lets institutions hold tokenized uranium alongside stablecoins on a Tezos-based layer 2
Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., the sole federally chartered crypto bank in the US, has added custody support for Etherlink and a basket of assets built on top of it. The most eyebrow-raising addition: xU3O8, a token that represents fractional ownership of physical uranium ore concentrate sitting in regulated vaults.
What Anchorage actually launched
The integration, activated on September 16, 2026, gives institutional clients the ability to custody assets on Etherlink, a layer-2 network built on Tezos using Smart Rollup technology. Etherlink is designed for Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility, meaning developers and users familiar with the Ethereum ecosystem can operate on it without learning a new toolkit.
The supported asset list goes beyond uranium. Anchorage now custodies WXTZ, stXTZ, USDT, USDC, USDSM, and WETH on the Etherlink network. xU3O8 carried a market cap of roughly $9 million at the time of announcement, with a token price around $5.66.
Transaction confirmations average around 500 milliseconds, with pre-confirmations potentially as fast as 50 milliseconds. Fees land below $0.001 per ERC-20 transaction.
Why uranium, and why now
Traditional uranium trading has long been the domain of large, specialized players. The commodity requires significant capital to acquire, physical storage in regulated facilities, and settlement cycles that can stretch for weeks.
Hex Trust began integrating custody for xU3O8 back in August 2025, and Kraken enabled trading of the token in July 2026. The custody trail tells a story: specialized crypto custodian first, exchange access second, federally chartered bank third.
The institutional custody angle
Anchorage’s status as a federally chartered bank, granted by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in early 2021, means it operates under the same regulatory framework as traditional banks. Its custody structures are segregated and bankruptcy-remote, two features that compliance teams and fiduciaries care deeply about.
The practical implication is that institutions can now hold tokenized uranium, stablecoins, and wrapped tokens within the same custody infrastructure they might use for Bitcoin or Ethereum, with no separate operational workflow and no additional counterparty risk assessment.
What this means for the RWA landscape
The $9 million market cap of xU3O8 is a reminder that this market is still embryonic. For context, that’s roughly the valuation of a modest DeFi protocol’s governance token.
Competition in institutional crypto custody has intensified, with firms like BitGo, Coinbase Custody, and Fireblocks all expanding their asset coverage. The Etherlink integration also validates the Tezos ecosystem’s pivot toward layer-2 infrastructure and EVM compatibility, a strategic shift that positions it to capture institutional use cases that might otherwise default to Ethereum or its more established rollups.
Original Source: Crypto Briefing
