Anchorage Digital Bank, a federally chartered crypto bank in the US, has expanded its partnership with Latin American crypto platform Bitso to cover both sides of the US-Mexico payments corridor.
Under the expanded deal, announced on Tuesday, Anchorage will hold in custody MXNB, Bitso’s stablecoin pegged to the Mexican peso. It will do so across six blockchains: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Avalanche and Arc.
Bitso also lists two US dollar stablecoins that Anchorage issues and holds in custody, Western Union’s USDPT and USAT.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Why the US-Mexico corridor
The money sent between the US and Mexico runs to tens of billions of dollars a year, much of it from workers sending money home to their families. About 15% of that flow already passes through Bitso’s systems, according to the companies.
“The US-Mexico corridor is where stablecoins stop being a thesis and start moving real money at scale,” said Nathan McCauley, Anchorage’s chief executive and co-founder. He described Anchorage as “the institutional custody layer on both sides of that flow.”
Ben Reid, Bitso’s head of stablecoins, said clients can now access the full dollar-to-peso route onchain, backed by a federally chartered bank.
Part of a Latin American push
The deal lands the same week Circle announced a pilot to test USDC settlement in Colombia, as stablecoin firms push further into Latin American payments.
What happens next
The companies did not share volumes for the new arrangement. The test is how much of the corridor’s remittance traffic moves onto stablecoin rails through the partnership.
