First, a note on the “pinpoint” matter: institutions want to get on the Ethereum settlement track—so the first question is who will handle custody for them. Puffer UniFi chose Anchorage Digital as the day-one institutional custodian—collaboration does not equal a mainnet launch.
Anchorage official on Sep 29: they’re on the “first U.S. federal-licensed crypto bank” line; this time they’re providing day-one institutional custody for Puffer UniFi, and will push stablecoin issuance, native settlement, and institutional payments infrastructure together. Agentic payments is also written into the collaboration scope—Anchorage’s payment controls for software agents (KYA, spending policies, compliance guardrails) need to be integrated into UniFi’s high-throughput settlement.
The wording here from Puffer is more direct: the more programmable payments become, the custody and settlement must evolve together; it also needs to stay synchronously composable with $ETH L1—don’t kick institutions out of the ETH liquidity pool. Chainwire added a note in the same article: a week ago, Google Cloud just joined Puffer Preconf as a registered gateway—gateway layer, custody layer—both are part of the pre-launch stack.
Selection criteria:
1️⃣ Day-one custodian = at launch, the custody slot is reserved first, not when TVL/issued volume is already proven
2️⃣ Writing stablecoin issuance into the partnership ≠ a specific stablecoin ticker has been minted today
3️⃣ Agentic payments ≠ an AI agent that has already been deployed on-chain and running automated payments
≠ Verona AI-agent stablecoin product ≠ Freemarket primary minting rail ≠ the one between Frgmnt×Anchorage.
Not investment advice. Just filtering—no teaching.
Source: Anchorage Digital Press Room Sep29; Chainwire/Brave New Coin reposted.