Anchorage Digital has taken a strategic stake in Immunefi and its IMU token, tying a U.S.-chartered crypto bank directly into on-chain bug bounty infrastructure for DeFi security.

Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, has made a strategic investment in security infrastructure provider Immunefi and purchased its native IMU token, tightening the link between regulated financial institutions and on-chain bug bounty markets. The move underscores how institutional players are increasingly treating protocol security as critical infrastructure rather than an afterthought, especially as capital flows back into higher-risk DeFi and L1 ecosystems.​

Immunefi operates one of crypto’s largest bug bounty platforms, linking white-hat hackers with protocols that pay out rewards for disclosed vulnerabilities instead of suffering live exploits. By taking both an equity-style strategic position and exposure to IMU, Anchorage is effectively underwriting the thesis that better-aligned incentives between security researchers and protocols can reduce tail-risk events that destabilize markets and damage institutional confidence. For clients that custody assets with Anchorage, the signal is clear: security infrastructure is becoming part of the investable stack, not just a cost center.​

For Immunefi, Anchorage’s involvement also helps legitimize IMU as part of a broader security ecosystem rather than a speculative side token. If the relationship deepens, one plausible path is tighter integration between Anchorage’s custody stack and Immunefi’s bounty coordination layer, allowing institutional clients to pre-commit budgets to security programs or ring-fence funds for rapid response payouts when vulnerabilities surface. Such tooling would mirror traditional cyber insurance and incident-response retainers, but enforced and settled on-chain.​

At the ecosystem level, the deal signals a slow but decisive shift: instead of merely insuring against crypto risk from the outside, regulated entities are now buying into the core primitives that reduce that risk at the protocol level. Whether that bet pays off will show up directly in exploit frequency, recovery rates, and the willingness of large, regulated pools of capital to treat DeFi rails as investable infrastructure rather than a speculative side-show.

Travis Hill, chair of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), confirmed that, in his opinion, a law passed in July would not give the agency the authority to guarantee stablecoin deposits. 

In remarks prepared for the American Bankers Association (ABA) Washington Summit on Wednesday, Hill said that under rules for the stablecoin payments bill, the GENIUS Act, the FDIC would not allow the government to guarantee deposits once the law was fully implemented. Similarly, stablecoin issuers would be prohibited from representing that the digital assets were FDIC insured, and a proposed plan would stop “pass-through insurance” by third parties.

“If a payment stablecoin arrangement qualified for pass-through insurance, this would mean that if a bank holding the issuer’s reserves in a deposit account failed, the FDIC would insure the deposit account based on the interests of the stablecoin holders, rather than insuring the account as a corporate deposit account eligible for only $250,000 of insurance,” said Hill.