Anchorage Digital has added custody support for CETES, a tokenized form of Mexican Federal Treasury Certificates issued by Etherfuse on the Stellar network. The move extends the federally chartered crypto bank’s product range into Latin American sovereign debt and adds a new asset class to the suite of tokenized real-world assets it holds on behalf of institutional clients.
CETES are short-term instruments issued by the Mexican federal government and among the country’s most widely traded debt securities. Etherfuse, the Mexico-based tokenisation platform behind what it calls Stablebonds, wraps the underlying instrument onchain. Stellar handles settlement and asset transfer, while Anchorage Digital sits at the custody layer, providing the regulated holding infrastructure that institutional investors require before they can allocate to a digital asset.
Nathan McCauley, co-founder and chief executive of Anchorage Digital, said the arrangement broadens the range of global assets institutions can hold on a single regulated platform. “Tokenized real-world assets are becoming a core part of institutional digital finance,” he said. “Through Etherfuse we are supporting CETES on Stellar, we’re expanding the range of global assets institutions can securely hold at Anchorage Digital and reinforcing our commitment to Mexico and the broader Latin American market.”
David Taylor, co-founder and chief executive of Etherfuse, pointed to the access argument: tokenisation can in principle widen the pool of participants in established government debt markets by lowering the operational friction of cross-border holding.
Three-layer infrastructure model
The announcement is structured as a three-party stack: issuance, network and custody. That architecture is becoming a recurring pattern in the tokenised real-world asset space. Issuers tokenise the underlying financial instrument, a public or permissioned blockchain provides the settlement rail, and a regulated custodian holds the resulting token on behalf of end investors. Each layer requires different regulatory permissions, and the custody component is often the bottleneck because it demands the deepest regulatory footing.
Anchorage Digital holds a national bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the first granted to a crypto-native firm in the US, as well as licences from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and a New York BitLicense. That multi-jurisdictional stack matters for an asset like CETES, where buyers may be based in the US, Europe or Asia but the underlying instrument is Mexican sovereign debt.
The announcement follows an earlier partnership Anchorage Digital disclosed with Grupo Salinas for cross-border settlement, which the company has framed as part of a sustained focus on Mexico and Latin America.
Market context and regulatory read-across
Tokenised government debt has attracted growing institutional interest globally. Franklin Templeton and BlackRock have both launched tokenised fund products in the US, and several European asset managers have explored onchain versions of sovereign debt. The Mexican CETES market is a natural candidate for tokenisation given the instrument’s liquidity and name recognition, but the cross-border custody and settlement infrastructure for emerging-market sovereign debt remains thin relative to US Treasuries or EU government bonds.
From a regulatory standpoint, the product sits at the intersection of several frameworks. In the US, the OCC’s posture on crypto-bank activities will shape how Anchorage Digital can market custody services to registered investment advisers and fund managers. In the EU, MiCA does not directly govern tokenised securities, which remain under MiFID II and the EU DLT Pilot Regime. Institutions considering CETES exposure will also need to weigh the Mexican peso currency risk embedded in the underlying instrument, which tokenisation does not remove.
The Stellar Development Foundation‘s chief business officer, Raja Chakravorti, described the arrangement as an example of blockchain improving access to global markets. The commercial test will be whether institutional demand for tokenised Mexican sovereign debt is sufficient to justify the compliance and operational overhead of onboarding a new asset class.