Anchorage Digital and Grupo Salinas Partner to Replace Bank Wire Infrastructure with Stablecoin Rails
Anchorage Digital, the first and only federally chartered digital asset bank in the United States, has signed a cross-border payments partnership with Mexico's Grupo Salinas, integrating stablecoin settlement into the conglomerate's financial operations and setting up a consumer-facing product launch across four countries in June 2026.
The agreement, reported by The Block on May 13, operates through Coinpro, the crypto division of Grupo Salinas. The conglomerate also controls Banco Azteca, one of Mexico's largest retail banks by branch count with more than 1,700 branches, and Grupo Elektra, its flagship retail and financial services arm, which was delisted from public markets in mid-2025 after only 0.3% of its shares remained in free float.
The practical target is the pipeline of remittances and business payments flowing through the group's network, which reaches deep into working-class and underbanked communities across Mexico.
The core technical shift involves replacing the traditional correspondent banking model, in which banks pre-fund accounts held at overseas partner institutions (called nostro and vostro accounts), with programmable stablecoin balances that settle in minutes rather than days. Anchorage is positioning its platform as stablecoin-agnostic, meaning it can handle multiple dollar-pegged tokens simultaneously: Tether's USA₮, Ethena Labs' USDtb, OSL's USDGO, and Western Union's recently launched USDPT, which Anchorage itself issued on the Solana blockchain in early May.
Carlos Díaz Alonso, an executive at Grupo Salinas, described the arrangement as involving the co-development of "more efficient channels that benefit Grupo Elektra's customers and users."
The deal arrives at a moment of significant momentum for Anchorage. Tether invested $100 million in the bank in February 2026, valuing it at $4.2 billion, and Anchorage is separately reported to be considering an IPO targeting $200 to $400 million in fundraising.
CEO Nathan McCauley said in early May that the company has a pipeline of up to 20 institutional or large technology companies ready to issue stablecoins through its platform, citing the GENIUS Act as a direct driver. McCauley also told CoinDesk that Anchorage has "won every single large stablecoin issuance mandate" since the Act passed.
That law, signed in July 2025, established the first federal framework for payment stablecoins in the United States, requiring issuers to hold one-to-one reserves in cash or short-term Treasuries and to meet monthly attestation and anti-money-laundering standards.
"We have really a dozen to maybe even as many as 20 institutional issuers or large tech company issuers who are going to come in and issue their stablecoin with us," McCauley told CoinDesk on May 7.
Grupo Salinas's founder, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, is Mexico's third-wealthiest individual and has been one of Latin America's most outspoken Bitcoin advocates for several years. By early 2026 he disclosed that approximately 80% of his investment portfolio was held in Bitcoin, up from roughly 10% in 2020.
That posture gives the Coinpro integration a strategic logic beyond cost savings. Salinas's large personal crypto allocation and years of vocal public advocacy suggest an interest in expanding adoption through the distribution networks he controls, even though no statement explicitly linking that intent to this specific deal has been made on record.
The market context adds weight to the announcement. Latin America received an estimated $174 billion in remittances in 2025, with Mexico accounting for $61.8 billion of that total. That figure represented a 4.5% year-over-year decline, a contraction that may reflect U.S. immigration policy headwinds and that makes the case for cheaper, faster crypto rails more pressing rather than less.
Crypto rails already handle a meaningful share of the US-Mexico corridor: Bitso, one of the region's largest crypto exchanges, processed approximately $6.5 billion through that route in 2024, representing more than 10% of the total corridor volume.
Stablecoin transfer fees average below 2%, compared to roughly 6% for traditional wire services, and a 2026 industry report from BVNK estimated that stablecoin settlement runs about 40% cheaper than legacy alternatives.
In 2024, stablecoins accounted for 39% of all crypto purchases in Latin America, up from 30% in 2023, reflecting the region's preference for dollar-linked assets in economies where local currencies carry inflation risk.
The total stablecoin market cap currently sits at approximately $320 billion, with Tether holding around 59% of that market.
The June 2026 consumer spend product planned under this partnership will launch in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and the Philippines. The inclusion of the Philippines is notable because it signals that Anchorage is building out Global South corridors beyond Latin America, not just deepening existing ones.
The same infrastructure, and the same compliance template built around GENIUS Act standards, could prove applicable to banks in Nigeria, Kenya, India, and Pakistan that face deteriorating access to correspondent banking relationships.
Smaller financial institutions in those markets have seen international banking partners pull back over the past decade due to the cost and complexity of compliance, a process known as de-risking. The trend is widely documented by the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements.
A regulated, federally chartered US counterparty offering programmable dollar settlement represents a potential answer to that problem, even if the immediate deployment is in Mexico City rather than Lagos or Karachi.
Whether any of the 20 firms in Anchorage's issuance pipeline include institutions focused on those corridors has not been disclosed.
The Carlos Díaz Alonso quote in this article was sourced via secondary reporting referencing The Block's original coverage. Verse Press is working to verify the exact wording against the primary publication.