Avanti unveiled a plan for a Wyoming digital-asset bank

The announcement

Avanti Financial Group on February 24, 2020, announced plans to seek a Wyoming special purpose depository institution charter for a bank focused on digital assets. Founder and chief executive Caitlin Long said the proposed institution would connect digital-asset custody and services with the U.S. dollar payments system. The company was preparing an application, not announcing an approved or operating bank.

That distinction was central to the event-day record. Avanti had been incorporated in Wyoming on January 6, had raised a $1 million seed round and had not yet submitted its charter application, according to contemporaneous reporting. It aimed to open in early 2021, subject to approval by the Wyoming Division of Banking. Those were company plans, not regulatory commitments.

Avanti also identified Blockstream as a strategic technology partner. The companies said Blockstream would contribute Bitcoin-focused applications and custody technology. The terms were not disclosed. Long described Avanti as protocol-neutral, while the initial announcement emphasized Bitcoin infrastructure and institutional customers.

Why Wyoming mattered

The plan depended on a banking category Wyoming had created in 2019. House Bill 74 established special purpose depository institutions as state-chartered banks. The law became operational on October 1, 2019, before Avanti’s announcement.

The statute imposed a model different from ordinary fractional-reserve lending. An SPDI had to maintain unencumbered liquid assets worth at least 100% of its depository liabilities, could not make loans except for limited permitted debt investments, and had to comply with applicable federal anti-money-laundering, customer-identification and beneficial-ownership laws. The act also required at least $5 million of initial capital stock, plus a paid-up surplus tied to estimated operating expenses.

That framework mattered to the digital-asset industry because custody, settlement and dollar banking sat at the boundary between crypto networks and regulated finance. Avanti’s proposal tested whether a purpose-built state bank could serve that boundary under banking supervision while preserving a custody-oriented, nonlending balance sheet. It did not settle questions about Federal Reserve access, nationwide operations or how federal agencies would treat every proposed service.

What was known on February 24

The narrow verified development was a launch plan backed by a founder’s public announcement, a named technology partner and an existing statutory route. Contemporaneous reporting said Avanti expected to offer payment, custody, securities and commodities services to institutional clients and had eight products in development. Only security-token custody was identified in that report, so the other products could not be independently assessed on February 24.

No charter, customer deposits or operating history existed in the record reviewed for that date. The $1 million seed figure came from the company through contemporaneous reporting; no financing filing or investor list reviewed for this reconstruction independently verifies it. Likewise, a target opening date was an aspiration contingent on regulatory approval and execution.

The development was therefore institutionally important without being a completed banking milestone. It showed an attempt to translate Wyoming’s newly effective digital-asset laws into a supervised business, but the announcement itself conferred no license and established no commercial adoption.

Later context

A company release dated March 17, 2020, confirmed that Avanti still planned to apply for the SPDI charter and named its leadership team. On October 28, 2020, the company said the Wyoming State Banking Board voted 8-0 to grant the charter. Those later events confirm that the February plan advanced, but they were not knowable outcomes on February 24 and do not change the announcement’s event-day status.