USAT is a US-regulated, dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A. and developed in partnership with Tether. It launched on January 27, 2026, becoming the first stablecoin Tether has tied directly to a federally chartered US bank and the first product the company built specifically to operate inside the GENIUS Act framework signed into law on July 18, 2025. USAT is a separate token from USDT. The two have separate reserves, separate issuance, separate redemption rails, and operate under different regulatory regimes. Tether did not migrate USDT to comply with US stablecoin law. Instead, the company split its product line: USDT continues to operate globally with roughly $189 billion in circulation as of early 2026, while USAT serves the US institutional and regulated-DeFi market.
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The split is structural. USDT is issued by Tether Operations, S.A. de C.V., which is not a US-regulated entity and is not the issuer of USAT. USAT is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, the only federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Cantor Fitzgerald serves as designated reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer. Bo Hines, former Executive Director of the White House Crypto Council, leads USAT as CEO of the Tether USAT entity. This article walks through what USAT is, why Tether built it, how it compares to USDC and USDP, where it can be used, and how cross-chain orchestration platforms route it alongside other regulated dollars.
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USAT (token symbol USA₮) is a fiat-backed stablecoin redeemable 1:1 for US dollars, with reserves held in cash and short-duration Treasury instruments at Cantor Fitzgerald. The token was announced on September 12, 2025, the same week the GENIUS Act came into force, and went live on Ethereum on January 27, 2026. Anchorage Digital Bank handles minting, burning, and redemption; Cantor Fitzgerald handles reserve custody and primary-dealer settlement. Tether contributes brand and distribution and supplies engineering support, but does not act as the issuer of record.
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The economic arrangement is straightforward. A regulated counterparty (an exchange, a market maker, a payments company, a corporate treasury) wires US dollars to Anchorage. Anchorage mints USAT on Ethereum and credits the counterparty's onchain wallet. To redeem, the counterparty burns USAT and Anchorage wires dollars back. Reserve attestations are produced under the cadence required by the GENIUS Act, which mandates monthly public disclosures and 100% reserves in cash, Treasury bills, repos, or central bank deposits. The Act's text also requires Bank Secrecy Act anti-money-laundering compliance for licensed issuers and bars commingling reserves with operating capital.
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Initial trading partners at launch included Kraken, OKX, and Crypto.com. Coinbase, which has a long-standing partnership with Circle and primarily lists USDC, is not part of the initial USAT rollout. Distribution focuses on US-domiciled venues subject to the Bank Secrecy Act and on regulated DeFi protocols building permissioned pools.
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The GENIUS Act forced a decision Tether had been deferring for years. The law applies federal stablecoin rules — issuer licensing, reserve composition, monthly attestations, AML — to any dollar-pegged token offered to US persons or distributed through US-regulated venues. Tether could not retrofit USDT into that framework without disrupting USDT's largest user populations, which are concentrated in emerging markets and operate on Tron and Ethereum. USDT's reserve composition, redemption process, and corporate domicile (El Salvador, after Tether's 2025 relocation from the British Virgin Islands) were never built for OCC supervision.
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The cleaner path was to ship a second token built to US specifications from day one and let USDT continue serving its existing markets. Tether's official launch announcement framed USAT as "made in America," a deliberate contrast to USDT's offshore positioning. The strategy also addresses competitive pressure: Circle reported USDC growing 72% year-over-year in 2025, while USDT's growth pace decelerated relative to USDC. Without a US-regulated product, Tether risked ceding the institutional segment to Circle and to PayPal's PYUSD.
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A third driver was access. The GENIUS Act gives compliant stablecoins clear pathways into US bank treasury workflows, broker-dealer collateral, and regulated tokenized-money-market products. Tether wanted those rails. Anchorage Digital Bank, which holds an OCC charter granted in January 2021, provided the regulated-bank issuer Tether did not have. Cantor Fitzgerald, which has held US Treasury bills on Tether's behalf since 2023, brought the primary-dealer pipe and the political relationships that come with it.
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USAT and USDT are operationally distinct tokens that share a brand. The differences matter for any team deciding which token to integrate.
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Backing differs in composition and disclosure. USDT reserves include cash, US Treasury bills, secured loans, corporate bonds, precious metals, and Bitcoin, disclosed quarterly through attestation reports. USAT reserves are restricted to cash and Treasury-grade instruments per the GENIUS Act, disclosed monthly. The narrower reserve mandate produces lower yield for Tether on the USAT float but higher regulatory durability.
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Issuer entity differs. USDT is issued by Tether Operations, S.A. de C.V., a non-US entity with no US bank charter. USAT is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., a federally chartered US bank. The implications cascade into who can custody the token, what reporting obligations apply to issuers, and what recourse holders have in the event of issuer failure — Anchorage's national bank charter brings federal receivership protections that Tether Operations does not provide.
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Redemption rails differ. USDT redemption requires a corporate account with Tether and a $100,000 minimum. USAT redemption operates through Anchorage's regulated banking pipes, with same-day Fedwire settlement available to Anchorage's corporate clients. The redemption surface is narrower (Anchorage clients only) but more predictable in timing and reporting.
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Chain availability differs. USDT trades on Ethereum, Tron, Solana, BNB Chain, Avalanche, and around two dozen additional chains. Tron carries the largest active-address share. USAT launched on Ethereum and expanded to Celo in March 2026, targeting Opera MiniPay's 14 million wallet users with sub-cent fees. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has stated Solana support is targeted by the end of 2026. Tron is not on the announced roadmap, which is consistent with the chain's offshore-distribution profile.
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Regulatory regime differs most. USDT is regulated under whatever framework applies in the jurisdiction where it is offered, which in many cases is none. USAT is supervised by the OCC, applies Bank Secrecy Act rules, and reports under the GENIUS Act monthly cadence. A US-domiciled corporate treasury holding USDT may face accounting and audit classifications, plus counterparty-risk treatment, that it does not face holding USAT.
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USAT now sits in a small group of US-regulated dollar stablecoins alongside Circle's USDC and Paxos's USDP. The three are similar enough that the choice often comes down to distribution and counterparty preferences, but the differences are real.
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USDC is issued by Circle Internet Financial, a state-chartered money transmitter (rather than a national bank), with reserves held at BNY Mellon and managed in part by BlackRock through the Circle Reserve Fund. USDC trades on Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, and twelve additional networks. Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol provides native burn-and-mint between deployments. USDC has the largest distribution footprint of the three: Coinbase, every major US exchange, most consumer wallets, and integration into traditional finance through partnerships with Visa and Mastercard.
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USDP is issued by Paxos Trust Company, a New York-chartered limited-purpose trust company supervised by the New York Department of Financial Services. Reserves are held entirely in cash and cash-equivalents at FDIC-insured banks, with monthly attestations published since 2018. USDP's market cap is the smallest of the three at roughly $40 million as of early 2026, but Paxos's regulatory pedigree and stablecoin-as-a-service business (Paxos issues PYUSD for PayPal and BUSD historically issued for Binance) gives the company outsized influence in compliance discussions.
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USAT is the newest entrant. Its differentiator is the federal national-bank charter held by Anchorage, which the OCC granted directly rather than through a state pathway, plus Tether's distribution muscle. Anchorage clients — institutional crypto funds, custodians, plus several sovereign treasuries — have direct minting access. The Cantor Fitzgerald primary-dealer relationship gives USAT a closer linkage to US Treasury markets than USDC or USDP have built.
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For a US institutional treasury choosing between the three, the practical questions are: which token does my custodian support, which token settles on the chains my counterparties use, and which issuer's failure mode is acceptable. USDC's chain coverage and Coinbase distribution favor it for active onchain operations. USDP's bankruptcy-remote trust structure favors it for treasury reserve allocation. USAT's national-bank charter and Cantor primary-dealer linkage favor it for institutions that want federal supervision and fast Treasury-grade settlement.
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USAT launched on Ethereum mainnet on January 27, 2026 and expanded to Celo in March 2026. Solana is targeted by year-end 2026 according to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino. Tron, BNB Chain, Tezos, plus Polygon — chains where USDT has significant circulation — are not on the announced USAT roadmap. The omission reflects Anchorage's risk tolerance for chains used heavily in offshore distribution.
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Initial centralized-exchange listings included Kraken, OKX, and Crypto.com. Kraken's USAT market highlighted USAT's regulated structure as a differentiator for US institutional clients. Coinbase has not listed USAT and is unlikely to, given its existing USDC distribution agreement with Circle. Binance.US is not a launch partner, and Tether has not announced a Binance.US listing.
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Onchain DeFi integrations are limited at the article date. Aave, Maker, plus Curve have not announced USAT pools, though Aave's GHO and Maker's USDS protocols have begun publishing collateral frameworks for GENIUS-compliant tokens. Several regulated DeFi venues built around permissioned pools (Ondo Finance's tokenized Treasury products, Securitize's institutional liquidity venues) have begun integrating USAT collateral, taking advantage of the token's federal-supervision profile.
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USAT's product-market fit is narrower than USDT's by design. The use cases are concentrated in three buckets.
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US institutional treasury and corporate finance. A US-domiciled corporate that wants stablecoin exposure for vendor payments, contractor payroll, or working-capital management has historically been pushed toward USDC. USAT is now an alternative, with Anchorage's national-bank issuer profile and the Cantor primary-dealer custody appealing to risk-conservative CFOs. The monthly attestation cadence and OCC supervision provide auditability that USDT cannot match. Treasury automation that requires compliance at execution time benefits from USAT's federal-bank issuer profile because compliance signals propagate through the issuer's banking infrastructure.
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Regulated DeFi and tokenized-Treasury products. Permissioned lending venues and tokenized Treasury products designed for US-regulated participants need a stablecoin that the venue's own regulators view as compliant. USAT's federal supervision profile fits this slot. Ondo Finance, Securitize, Maple Finance, and similar regulated-DeFi platforms can integrate USAT without the ambiguity that surrounds USDT integrations in US-supervised contexts.
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Cross-border B2B payments with US receiver. A non-US sender paying a US recipient through stablecoin rails benefits from USAT on the receiving end if the recipient is bound by US bank-secrecy reporting. The token's GENIUS Act reporting profile makes it the cleanest stablecoin for the recipient's compliance team to accept. B2B stablecoin payout APIs are beginning to add USAT routing alongside USDC for US-receiver flows.
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The use cases USAT does not target are also worth naming. Retail remittance into emerging markets continues to flow through USDT on Tron, where transaction fees are sub-cent and infrastructure is mature. Onchain trading on permissionless DEXs continues to use USDC and USDT, where liquidity is deep. Mass-market retail payments outside the US continue to favor USDT.
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Understanding USAT requires understanding the law it was built to satisfy. The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, signed by President Trump on July 18, 2025, created the first federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins in the United States. The Act draws a sharp line between "permitted payment stablecoins" — tokens issued by federally licensed entities and meeting reserve and disclosure rules — and everything else.
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Reserve composition is the most consequential rule. A permitted issuer must hold 100% of token-backing reserves in cash, demand deposits at insured banks, US Treasury bills with a maturity of 93 days or less, repurchase agreements collateralized by short-duration Treasuries, or central bank deposits. Money-market fund holdings are allowed only if the underlying fund itself meets equivalent constraints. Corporate bonds, secured loans, precious metals, and crypto assets — all of which appear at various points in USDT's reserves — are prohibited. USAT's structure puts reserves entirely with Cantor Fitzgerald in cash and short-duration Treasuries, satisfying the rule from day one.
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Issuer eligibility is the second binding constraint. Only three issuer categories qualify: subsidiaries of insured depository institutions approved by their primary federal regulator, federal qualified payment stablecoin issuers chartered by the OCC, and state qualified issuers under state regimes deemed substantially similar to the federal regime. Anchorage Digital Bank's national-bank charter, granted by the OCC in January 2021, places it squarely in the second category. Tether Operations, S.A. de C.V., a non-US entity, would not qualify under any of the three pathways.
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Disclosure cadence sets a monthly floor. Permitted issuers must publish a public report each month detailing reserve composition, total tokens in circulation, and a comparison to the previous month. An independent third-party attestation is required; for issuers above $50 billion in circulation, a full audit is required. USAT publishes monthly attestations executed by a registered public accounting firm, signed by Anchorage's CFO and reviewed by the OCC.
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Bank Secrecy Act compliance is the fourth pillar. Permitted issuers are treated as financial institutions for BSA purposes, with full obligations around know-your-customer programs, transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting, and sanctions screening. Anchorage already operated under BSA as a national bank, so layering USAT issuance on top of existing compliance was incremental rather than greenfield work. For issuers without prior bank-level BSA infrastructure, this requirement is the highest barrier to entry.
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Holder protections come last but matter for institutional adoption. The GENIUS Act establishes that token holders have a senior claim on reserve assets in the event of issuer insolvency, with reserves segregated from issuer operating accounts and held in a way that survives bankruptcy proceedings. For Anchorage, this is reinforced by the FDIC's resolution authority over national banks. A USAT holder facing issuer failure has a clearer recovery path than a USDT holder facing the same scenario at Tether Operations.
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USAT is one piece of Tether's broader product strategy. The company has spent the past three years building a portfolio of stablecoins and tokenized assets that target different jurisdictions, reserve types, and yield profiles.
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USDT remains the global flagship, with roughly $183.6 billion in circulation across 20+ chains. It serves as the default trading pair on most centralized exchanges outside the US and the dominant remittance rail in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
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USAT is the US-regulated dollar product, launched January 2026 on Ethereum. It targets the institutional and regulated-DeFi segment that USDT cannot serve due to GENIUS Act constraints.
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XAUT (Tether Gold) is a token backed 1:1 by physical gold held in Swiss vaults, with each token representing one troy ounce. XAUT expanded to BNB Chain on March 27, 2026 and serves as collateral for the company's gold-backed synthetic dollar product.
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aUSDT (Alloy by Tether) is a synthetic dollar minted against XAUT collateral, allowing holders to retain gold exposure while accessing dollar-denominated liquidity for daily transactions. aUSDT is structured as an overcollateralized stablecoin similar in mechanism to MakerDAO's DAI but with gold rather than crypto assets as backing.
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Hadron is Tether's tokenization platform, launched in late 2024, that allows institutions and sovereign treasuries to issue their own digital assets using Tether's technology stack. Hadron is the infrastructure layer underneath aUSDT and is positioned as Tether's answer to BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's FOBXX in the broader tokenized-money-fund market.
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This portfolio approach lets Tether maintain USDT for the markets it dominates, ship USAT for the US regulatory regime, and build adjacent products (XAUT, aUSDT, Hadron) that diversify revenue away from US Treasury yield. The strategic logic is similar to how Visa operates Visa Direct, Visa Click to Pay, and Visa B2B Connect as separate products under one brand: each serves a distinct market with its own compliance and counterparty profile.
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USAT is new, and several elements of the rollout remain unsettled. Chain coverage is the most immediate gap. Two chains (Ethereum, Celo) at launch is narrow compared to USDC's fifteen and USDT's twenty-plus. Until USAT reaches Solana, Base, Arbitrum, and other chains where institutional treasuries actually operate, integration friction will limit adoption. Tether has stated that expansion is on the roadmap, but execution timelines for stablecoin deployments often slip.
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Liquidity depth is the second concern. USAT order books on Kraken and OKX in the first quarter after launch were a fraction of USDT order-book depth. Treasurers moving large notional values face slippage costs that USDC integrations have already commoditized away. Building deep secondary-market liquidity requires market makers to commit balance sheet, which typically takes 12 to 24 months for a new stablecoin to develop.
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Regulatory durability sits in the background. The GENIUS Act is federal law, but implementation rules from the OCC, FDIC, and Treasury are still being finalized. Specific rules around interchange between regulated and non-regulated stablecoins, around DeFi integration of regulated stablecoins, and around treatment of foreign-issued stablecoins for US users will shape USAT's competitive position. A more permissive regulatory interpretation favors USAT's incumbent advantages; a more restrictive interpretation could narrow the gap with Circle's USDC, which already has the broader distribution moat.
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Governance independence is a quieter risk. Anchorage Digital Bank is the legal issuer, but the brand, the marketing, and significant engineering come from Tether. Regulators may revisit the issuer-versus-distributor distinction if USAT's commercial decisions appear to flow from Tether rather than from Anchorage. Maintaining a clean separation between Anchorage's banking judgment and Tether's product strategy will be an ongoing operational discipline.
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Finally, market segmentation between USAT and USDT could create arbitrage. If a holder can convert between the two at par on secondary markets, the regulatory premium of USAT may not hold. If issuers prevent direct convertibility (Anchorage will not redeem USAT for USDT, and Tether will not redeem USDT for USAT), the two tokens may trade at slightly different prices during periods of stress. Treasurers integrating both should model this scenario.
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USAT's two-chain footprint (Ethereum, Celo) is small relative to USDT's twenty-plus chains, but cross-chain operations are still relevant. A US institutional treasury holding USAT on Ethereum and needing to settle a payment on Celo to a MiniPay user in Africa needs a route between the two. A regulated DeFi platform accepting USAT collateral on one chain and rebalancing liquidity to another needs a route. As USAT extends to Solana later in 2026, route count grows.
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Eco operates as a stablecoin orchestration network across 15 chains, including Ethereum, Solana, Celo, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, plus BNB Chain. The Routes product (CLI and API) accepts an intent to move stablecoin value from one chain to another and selects between transport rails — Circle's CCTP for USDC, native bridges for USDT, plus direct burn-and-mint for tokens that support it — based on cost, speed, and finality. As USAT chain support expands, Eco can route USAT alongside other regulated stablecoins. For now, the practical orchestration use case is bridging between USAT on Ethereum and USDC or USDT on chains where USAT does not yet exist, then converting back when USAT support arrives.
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Cross-chain orchestration becomes more relevant as USAT is integrated into payments workflows where the sender holds one stablecoin and the receiver wants another. A B2B payment originating from a corporate USDC treasury on Base and settling to a US recipient that prefers USAT on Ethereum is a routing problem. The orchestrator handles the swap, the bridge, and the settlement in a single intent.
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No. USAT and USDT are separate tokens with separate issuers, separate reserves, and separate regulatory regimes. USDT is issued by Tether Operations, S.A. de C.V. and circulates globally. USAT is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A. and is built specifically for the US GENIUS Act framework. They share Tether branding and engineering but are not interchangeable.
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Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A. is the issuer of USAT. Anchorage holds an OCC national-bank charter granted in January 2021, making it the first federally chartered crypto bank in the US. Cantor Fitzgerald serves as the designated reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer. Tether itself is not the legal issuer of USAT.
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USAT launched on Ethereum mainnet on January 27, 2026 and expanded to Celo in March 2026. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has stated that Solana support is planned by the end of 2026. Other chains where USDT operates (Tron, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Polygon) are not on the public USAT roadmap.
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USDC is issued by Circle Internet Financial, a state-chartered money transmitter, with reserves at BNY Mellon. USAT is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, a federally chartered national bank supervised by the OCC. USDC has broader chain coverage (15+ chains via CCTP) and deeper exchange distribution including Coinbase. USAT has tighter Treasury-market integration through the Cantor Fitzgerald primary-dealer relationship.
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Yes, but only through Anchorage Digital Bank's regulated banking pipes. Holders must have a corporate account with Anchorage to redeem directly. Retail holders typically redeem indirectly through exchanges (Kraken, OKX, Crypto.com) that maintain Anchorage accounts. Same-day Fedwire settlement is available to direct Anchorage clients.
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