Anchorage Digital Swap Dealer, LLC has applied to register as a swap dealer with the CFTC through the National Futures Association, The Block reports in an exclusive. If approved, it plans to offer European-style bitcoin and ether options with maturities of up to one year.
The National Futures Association is still reviewing the filing. Chief executive Nathan McCauley would not give a timeline, saying the firm is not in a position to speculate on timing.
Registration would put the business under CFTC capital, risk-management and margin rules, using the Dodd-Frank framework that Anchorage says already applies to banks in interest-rate, credit and foreign-exchange markets. More products could follow, subject to internal and regulatory approval.
The firm’s pitch rests on its charter. Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A. became the first federally chartered digital asset bank in 2021, regulated by the OCC. This year it added collateral management to its Atlas platform, and in December it bought Securitize’s wealth management unit.
Demand, the company says, comes partly from public companies that hold bitcoin and ether and want to hedge or earn yield on them.
That claim is hard to test. McCauley declined to disclose options trading volumes or growth, and would not explain how Anchorage previously arranged options trades for clients.
So the application describes a business that already exists in some form, without saying how big it is or under what authority it ran until now. The regulator’s answer is the missing piece.
