Invest2 publishers2 min readPublished
Eight months after a $4.2 billion Tether valuation, Anchorage Digital cuts 17% of its staff
Anchorage Digital is cutting about 17% of staff, an estimated 68 jobs, eight months after Tether's $100 million investment valued it at $4.2 billion. That price covered a roughly 2.4% stake, and Anchorage's own 2023 record points to a cost cut it has reversed before.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- CEO Nathan McCauley told employees the cuts stem from the general crypto downturn, according to The Information.
- Anchorage last cut staff on March 14, 2023, letting go of about 75 people, roughly 20% of its workforce at the time.
- CryptoJobsList counts at least 7,411 crypto job cuts at 60 companies in 2026, the largest being Block's 4,000 in February.
- Anchorage's bank subsidiary was spared in the 2023 cuts, and the company has not said whether the new round reaches it.
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Why it matters
- decision Anchorage chose to shrink payroll even with fresh Tether capital on hand, so the new money goes to runway and the employee share sale while headcount absorbs the downturn.
- precedent Anchorage cut staff in 2023 and then hired again, so this round can be reversed, and a crypto recovery would likely send the company back to hiring.
- exposure Institutional clients rely on a custodian that is shrinking staff while adding services such as triparty collateral, so where the cuts fall matters more to them than how many.
- constraint Laid-off Anchorage staff outside engineering and compliance face a crypto job market where those two functions hold the largest shares of the openings that remain.
At $4.2 billion, Tether's $100 million bought roughly 2.4% of Anchorage [2][1]. The valuation is the price of that slice. Because the deal also funded the employee tender offer [5], not all of the $100 million necessarily reached Anchorage's own accounts, and the reports do not say how it was split. Cryptopolitan wrote that the layoffs "do not appear as a desperate need for cash, but as an effort to reduce expenses" [7].
The 2023 round shows what Anchorage does with headcount. Seventy-five people at 20% of staff implies about 375 employees before that cut and 300 after [8][2]. McCauley told Congress in February 2025 that the company had about 400 [3], so Anchorage added roughly 100 net hires in under two years [3]. During the 2023 cuts, client assets under custody hit a record [9].
If headcount was still near 400 this year, the 17% cut [1] comes to the estimated 68 [4] and takes staff to about 332 [7]. That gives back about two-thirds of the net hiring since 2023 [6] and still leaves Anchorage larger than it was after its last round [2].
By the year's standards, Anchorage's estimated cut is about average. Block's 4,000 is about 54% of the 2026 tally [4]. Spread the remaining 3,411 across the other 59 companies and the average is about 58 jobs [5]. Hiring is thin as well. Tiger Research found new listings on the main crypto job boards down about 80% year over year in January [13]. Of the 2,932 openings it tracked in the first half, engineering made up 34.1%, stablecoins and payments 13.4%, and compliance and legal 10.4% [14].
If 2023 repeats, Anchorage keeps a smaller staff while custody assets hold up, then hires again when prices recover. A retreat would look different: a business line wound down, or cuts reaching Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., the only federally chartered crypto-focused national trust bank in the US [11]. Cryptopolitan argues for a third reading, that regulated infrastructure firms are concentrating resources [16]. In June, Binance added Anchorage to its triparty banking network, letting institutions keep collateral in regulated custody while they trade [15].
I think a repeat of 2023 is the most likely outcome. A price set on a 2.4% stake does not pay salaries, and Anchorage has now cut staff twice in weak markets and grew in between [8][6][3]. The opposing view is that the cut tracks falling revenue that the February price has not yet reflected. A lower custody figure in Anchorage's next update would support that view and show that the cost-cutting explanation is wrong.
What to watch
- An official headcount from Anchorage, which would test the estimated 68 and the assumption that staff was still near 400.
- Any new funding round or secondary sale that prices Anchorage against the $4.2 billion Tether paid in February.
- Tiger Research's second-half 2026 hiring data, showing whether engineering and compliance keep their share of crypto openings.