What 12 Years at Citi Taught Anchorage's AJ Macey About Digital Asset Settlement

From Citi to Atlas

AJ Macey joined Anchorage Digital as MD of Growth after about 13 years at Citi and has been at the firm for about four years. He lists its services as custody, trading, staking, governance, settlements, fiat banking, stablecoin issuance and Atlas. He says Anchorage provides custody for BlackRock and stablecoin issuance for Tether, Western Union, Ethena and Falcon Finance.

Built after FTX

Atlas started after FTX and the bear market that followed, Macey says, as a settlements product on top of the custody stack meant for "operational efficiency, operational safety, and counterparty credit risk mitigation." Cantor Fitzgerald, Spark and Kamino are among its collateral management partners. He says hundreds of customers use the network, but he wants throughput and volume to grow well past current levels.

He calls CLS the "gold star standard" of the FX market and says Anchorage is taking market best practices and upgrading that infrastructure through blockchain. The system runs daily settlement windows, so users do not wait on a T-plus cycle.

What CMS does

Atlas CMS, short for Coordinated Multi-Party Settlement, lets prime brokers and prime service firms that extend access and credit to clients trade on non-custodial exchanges and ECNs. Macey says Anchorage began working on it about a year ago, as regulatory clarity arrived in the US and firms discussed onshoring spot crypto trading. SpotX, an FX shop, was the first partner announced. Anchorage wants to work with DeFi venues such as Hyperliquid as well as more traditional exchanges.

Selling the outcome

AJ Macey says the product is whatever the client says it is: "The product is not spot settlements. The product is prime brokerage." Spot settlement and CMS are the building blocks underneath.