Puffer Finance announced a strategic alliance with Anchorage Digital to embed institutional-grade custody and payment settlement support into Puffer UniFi, the company’s Ethereum-aligned execution and settlement network. Under the agreement, Anchorage Digital will act as Puffer UniFi’s day-one institutional custodian while the two firms collaborate on stablecoin infrastructure, native settlement capabilities, and agentic payment rails.
The partnership links Anchorage Digital’s regulated institutional digital asset platform with Puffer UniFi’s high-performance execution and settlement layer. The companies say this combination is intended to provide institutions with the ability to securely hold assets, move stablecoins, and settle transactions onchain within an environment that prioritizes fast execution and real-time settlement.
Puffer UniFi is described by Puffer Finance as an execution and settlement network designed to support high-throughput execution and real-time settlement while remaining connected to Ethereum L1 liquidity through synchronous composability. That design goal aims to let institutions access faster onchain execution without disconnecting from Ethereum’s liquidity and security.
Under the terms of the collaboration, Anchorage will support stablecoin issuance and institutional payment infrastructure on Puffer UniFi in addition to serving as custodian at launch. The teams will also work on agentic payments, combining Anchorage’s institutional and agentic payment infrastructure with Puffer UniFi’s execution and settlement environment to develop rails for programmable payments and more automated onchain financial activity.
The announcement adds to recent moves by Puffer Finance to assemble enterprise-oriented infrastructure prior to network launch. One week earlier Puffer revealed a partnership with Google Cloud, in which Google Cloud joined Puffer Preconf as a registered gateway and Puffer UniFi was named the first rollup to use that infrastructure. Together, the Google Cloud and Anchorage Digital partnerships form complementary layers for Puffer UniFi: gateway and cloud infrastructure on the one hand, and institutional digital asset custody and settlement on the other.
Amir Forouzani, Co-Founder of Puffer Finance, framed the collaboration in terms of the evolving nature of payments and the need for custody and settlement to adapt in parallel: "As payments become increasingly programmable, custody and settlement infrastructure need to evolve together. Our partnership with Anchorage Digital brings institutional infrastructure to Puffer UniFi from day one, creating rails for stablecoins, payments, and agentic financial activity while remaining composable with Ethereum"
Nathan McCauley, CEO and Co-Founder of Anchorage Digital, emphasized the institutional expectations Anchorage aims to bring to the network: "Institutions want to hold assets, move stablecoins, and settle transactions onchain with the same security and controls they expect everywhere else in their business. Serving as Puffer UniFi’s custodian from day one means those foundations are in place at launch, on a network that keeps institutions connected to Ethereum’s liquidity and security."
About Puffer Finance
Puffer Finance is an Ethereum infrastructure company building Puffer UniFi, an Ethereum-aligned execution and settlement network for institutions, trading platforms, and agentic commerce. Puffer is backed by Ethereum Foundation, Electric Capital, Brevan Howard Digital, Coinbase Ventures, YZi Labs, F-Prime Capital, and Franklin Templeton.
About Anchorage Digital
Anchorage Digital provides institutional digital asset infrastructure, including prime services, tokenization, stablecoins, and governance frameworks for agentic finance. Anchorage Digital is home to Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., described as America’s first federally regulated digital asset bank. The company also serves institutions through Anchorage Digital Singapore, licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore; Anchorage Digital NY, which holds a BitLicense from the New York Department of Financial Services; and a self-custody wallet called Porto by Anchorage Digital. Anchorage Digital Bank offers fiat custody via an FDIC-insured licensed sub-custodian. The company is funded by institutions including Andreessen Horowitz, GIC, Goldman Sachs, KKR, and Visa, and is described as having a valuation of $4.2 billion. Founded in 2017 in San Francisco, Anchorage Digital has offices in New York; Porto, Portugal; Singapore; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
The partnership centers on infrastructure and interoperability at launch rather than on a specific product timetable. Puffer Finance continues to build out the network ahead of launch, with the two announced partnerships intended to layer enterprise-grade gateway infrastructure and institutional digital-asset infrastructure on top of Puffer UniFi’s execution and settlement architecture.
For institutional participants and trading platforms, the combination of a regulated custodian and an execution layer that aims for synchronous composability with Ethereum could influence how stablecoins and onchain payments are integrated into enterprise workflows. The collaboration is presented as an effort to align custody, settlement, and payments infrastructure so that programmable and agentic financial activity can operate with institutional controls and security from the outset.
Contact for Puffer Finance: Co-Founder Amir Forouzani, [email protected]