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Exploring account structures

Infrastructure Services account structures are usually described as single labels—“pure omnibus,” “FBO,” “virtual accounts”—but each label bundles three independent decisions. This explorer separates them so you can flip one at a time and watch the same deposit take a different path through the books.

The three switches

Each switch answers a different question, and you can move them almost independently.
  • FBO or omnibus—a question of legal title: who the money belongs to at the account level.
  • Disclosed or undisclosed—a question of compliance: who runs know your customer (KYC) checks on the end user.
  • Subaccounting or virtual accounting—a question of source of truth: whose ledger is authoritative for each customer’s balance.
Switches 1 and 3 have one dependency between them. FBO title passes beneficial interest through to named beneficiaries, and an ownership right can’t pass through to a share we don’t track. Virtual accounting puts that share on the client’s own ledger, so there’s nothing at Anchorage Digital for the titled interest to attach to. Selecting FBO therefore holds attribution at Subaccounting, and Virtual is unavailable until you switch back to Omnibus.The rail switch changes the mechanics that carry the money: a Fedwire transfer into a correspondent account for USD, or an on-chain transfer into a vault for crypto. Attribution differs by rail—USD deposits are told apart by a virtual account number or an FFC reference, while crypto deposits are told apart by deposit address, never by memo.

Reading the diagram

Solid lines are movement of value. Dashed lines are oversight and reconciliation. The line that animates is the one active in the current step, so stepping through the flow shows the order in which each book posts. The deposit runs left to right along the upper track — customer, rail, custody — and the withdrawal returns along the lower one.Play, step, and reset sit directly above the chart. Three panels then overlay it as you move through the flow:
  • The step callout appears over the lower left, naming the current step and what it does. It changes as you step.
  • The books sits at the bottom right and appends entries as each step fires, so you can watch the same deposit hit the correspondent statement or chain, the general ledger, and the customer book in sequence. It covers the ledger boxes it describes, so Hide collapses it to a header bar when you want the chart unobstructed.
  • Structure · Disclosure · Attribution sits at the bottom left, restating what the three switches currently mean.
Below the chart, Who holds what turns the same configuration into a set of obligations: legal title, compliance ownership, source of truth, and where the funds availability check happens.Ben Okafor and Chloe Kim are ghosted above Ana and never move. They are there because the pool holds their balances too — which is precisely what makes the attribution question matter.The starred Source of truth badge marks the switch that matters most operationally. Under subaccounting, a payout larger than the customer’s own balance is rejected even when the pool has funds. Under virtual accounting, the pool clears the payout and enforcing each customer’s limit stays with the client.

What this page doesn’t decide

The seven coherent switch combinations render here for teaching purposes. Which structures Anchorage Digital actually offers, and in which phase, is a product decision rather than a property of the mechanics. The eighth combination is excluded for a mechanical reason, not a product one: FBO can’t ride on virtual accounting.
For the structures available today and the approvals each one needs, see B2B2X accounts. For the client-facing version of the same material, see B2B2X account structures.
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