Anchorage Anchors Both Ends of US-Mexico Stablecoin Corridor

Anchorage Digital Bank now custodies stablecoins on both sides of one of the world's largest money-transfer corridors. On Tuesday, the federally chartered crypto bank expanded its custody-and-listing arrangement with Latin American platform Bitso to cover the full United States–Mexico remittance route, holding the peso and dollar tokens that move between the two countries.

The centerpiece is MXNB, Bitso's Mexican peso stablecoin. Anchorage Digital Bank now custodies MXNB across six blockchains: Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche and Arc. On the other side of the corridor, Bitso has listed USDPT and USAT — the U.S. dollar stablecoins issued by Western Union and Tether respectively — both of which Anchorage issues and custodies. The companies did not disclose financial terms.

Why the US-Mexico corridor matters

The route moves tens of billions of dollars every year and ranks among the biggest cross-border payment flows on earth. Much of that money still travels through correspondent banking, wire transfers and cash-pickup networks that are slow and expensive.

About 15% of the corridor already runs through Bitso's own infrastructure. Anchorage's bet is straightforward: stablecoins settle on-chain in seconds, around the clock, and will keep displacing those legacy rails. But that shift requires custody that is regulated and sits wherever the liquidity pools.

"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. He argued the firm is now "the institutional custody layer on both sides of that flow."

Ben Reid, Bitso's head of stablecoin, framed the deal in operational terms. Clients can now access the full dollar-peso corridor entirely on-chain, he said, backed by a federally chartered bank.

What does this change for issuers and banks?

In practice, it gives Anchorage a claim to become the default custodian for any stablecoin issuer or bank entering the route. By holding both the peso leg and the dollar leg, the bank removes a coordination problem that issuers otherwise face when they try to serve a two-currency corridor.

The deal also builds on Anchorage's deepening stablecoin footprint. The bank issues Tether's U.S.-regulated USAT stablecoin, a role that already ties it to one of the largest dollar-token issuers in the market. Bitso, for its part, has been pushing MXNB across networks such as Arbitrum, extending the peso coin's reach beyond a single chain.

For Western Union, the listing carries a different weight. The payments giant built its franchise on exactly the cash-pickup and wire rails that stablecoins now target. Having USDPT listed inside a crypto platform that already handles roughly 15% of the corridor signals how quickly legacy operators are hedging toward on-chain settlement.

A regional race is accelerating

The Bitso arrangement 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 move toward mainstream payment use.

The pattern across these deals is consistent. Issuers and custodians are pairing regulated bank custody with multi-chain distribution, then targeting specific remittance corridors where the cost and speed gaps against legacy rails are widest. Latin America, with its high remittance volumes and persistent friction in correspondent banking, has become the proving ground.

Anchorage's positioning — a federal banking charter plus issuance plus custody on both currency legs — is the most consolidated version of that playbook so far in the US-Mexico lane. Whether rivals like Circle respond with corridor-specific arrangements of their own will shape how quickly institutional liquidity migrates on-chain.

The financial terms stayed private, and neither company set a timeline for measurable corridor volume. But with MXNB live under Anchorage custody on six chains and both dollar tokens listed at Bitso, the infrastructure is now in place. The next signal to watch is whether corridor volume through Bitso climbs meaningfully above its current 15% share — and whether other federally chartered banks follow Anchorage into multi-currency corridor custody.