Michael Belshe
Analyst · Craig-Hallum
Thank you, everyone, for joining Bitgo's first earnings call as a public company. Since this is our first earnings call, I'm going to give a little more background on Bitgo than we will going forward. Some of you may have heard this before during the IPO process. So thank you for your patience as we go through it, but I want to make sure we're all starting from the same place. All right. So when we founded Bitgo over a decade ago, we wanted to create a company that could meaningfully contribute to accelerating the transition to a digital economy. At Bitgo, we believe that digital assets are already fundamentally reshaping the financial system and are going to continue to do so. The ongoing announcements and news from all major traditional firms from Fidelity to Morgan Stanley to SoFi demonstrate that this is true. Since Bitgo's inception, we've been building for a future where all assets will be digital. Early in my own crypto journey, it became clear that the infrastructure to support the shift to digital assets was nonexistent and the ecosystem was incredibly immature. Established financial institutions didn't have a compliant framework, secure custody or even institutional-grade security solutions to rely on. So we set out to build the technology to provide this institutional-grade infrastructure, which could elevate digital assets to a higher level. The product we created is now the industry standard, multi-signature threshold MPC wallets that protect against both theft and loss, and this is what Bitgo was founded on. While other early participants built retail products, we established our track record for building institutional-grade infrastructure. In 2014, we introduced enterprise policy controls to digital asset wallets. In 2018, we launched the first U.S. trust company purpose-built for digital assets. We expanded into prime services and liquidity in 2020 and became the first to support qualified custody under New York DFS framework in 2021. We built a globally regulated platform spanning the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Middle East. As you're probably aware, we recently received our National Bank Charter under the Office of Control of the Currency, OCC. That made Bitgo the first public federally chartered digital asset infrastructure company. And we scaled our business model support over 1,700 assets across thousands of institutions and over 1 million users. Through these accomplishments, we've continued to differentiate Bitgo in the broader digital asset industry. To start, we operate purely as infrastructure. We do not manage exchanges. We do not compete with our clients nor do we have the same kind of exposure to digital assets that retail platforms do. We exist to provide security and compliance that empower institutions to participate in the digital asset economy. Our institutional client base is investing in crypto for the long term and has proven itself much stickier and less impacted by short-term market cycles than retail users. It's also important to note that we didn't enter this industry during or because of a hype cycle. We were built and battle tested through many market cycles, fulfilling a growing and enduring need for our clients. Bottom line, Bitgo today is the digital asset infrastructure company, powering institutions, platforms and nations redefining the global economy, and we stand apart as the premier infrastructure provider. So you can think of us a bit like a hyperscaler for digital assets. We're a one-stop shop, multiproduct platform with institutional-grade infrastructure and mission-critical reliability that our partners can build and scale on regardless of where that takes us globally. We believe that no other company can provide the streamlined and comprehensive suite of solutions that we do. Institutions have been forced many times to piece together providers, opening themselves up to operational risk and increased inefficiency. Our vertical platform was built with security as the foundation and provides wallets, qualified custody, trading, staking, lending, settlement and compliance tools, all within one unified scalable infrastructure. Starting with wallets. These are developed in-house and integrated across our platform, driving client stickiness. We operate regulated trust entities globally and provide qualified custody under the most stringent and rigorous regulatory frameworks in the world. Our Go network allows clients to settle assets 24 hours a day, 7 days a week directly from cold storage, which is a significant differentiator. The liquidity services we offer enable institutions to trade, stake, borrow and lend without commingling assets. We're proud to have one of the largest institutional staking platforms in the world. Finally, we also provide Infrastructure as a Service capabilities. This includes token management, stablecoin issuance and crypto as a service. To briefly recap our most recent results, I'm proud of the impressive revenue growth of 424% we achieved for the full year, driven primarily by digital asset sales and gains in subscriptions and services, partially offset by a decline in staking revenue due to digital asset prices. Obviously, Bitgo is a long-term believer in digital assets, and we evaluate our business performance independent of short-term price volatility. So rather than solely citing the USD value of assets on platform, which fluctuates with market prices independent of our business activity, we'd like to also share coin unit growth and price normalized growth that more directly reflect Bitgo's performance rather than the market's pricing. On a unit basis, BTC on platform grew 8% year-over-year and our top 5 assets by volume grew 3% year-over-year, growth driven entirely by client inflows, not market price movement. On that normalized price basis, assets on platform grew 16% year-over-year. Asset states declined 7% on the same basis. This is a trend we continue to monitor as certain tokens unlock over time. We believe these normalized figures represent Bitgo's strong performance in an otherwise very volatile market. Moving on to our growth strategy. Our platform operates at the center of the digital asset ecosystem with each new integration, new asset and new user making Bitgo more useful, more defensible and more essential. When protocols, fintechs and issuers build on Bitgo, they bring assets and transaction volume onto the platform. That, in turn, increases demand for liquidity, staking services, financing solutions and compliance infrastructure. Growth in assets and flows naturally gives greater engagement across our product suite. And as we expand functionality, whether through new asset support, prime capabilities or infrastructure services, we increase cross-sell opportunities and deepen our client relationships. The result is a scalable platform model that underpins our growth strategy, driving market expansion, client growth and product expansion that reinforce one another, contributing to revenue growth over time. Now starting with market expansion. We are actively replicating our product in markets globally to ensure that we can serve clients wherever they operate. In 2025, we made more regulatory progress in international markets, notably expanding our license in Germany and becoming custody broker in Dubai. At the domestic level, our OCC license supports our expansion in the U.S. and allows us to provide digital asset services to clients across all 50 states under a single national regulatory framework. In 2026, we are actively expanding into additional regions with several new licenses and registrations already in progress in India, South Korea, the U.K. and the Cayman Islands. We see the biggest opportunity for expansion this year in the APAC region, which represents a significant share of global crypto liquidity and has already established regulatory frameworks for digital asset custody and infrastructure. These markets are seeing increased engagement from banks, asset managers and family offices exploring digital assets, stablecoins and tokenized financial products. Because Bitgo already has a strong presence across several of these hubs, we're well positioned to support institutional clients and adoption as it accelerates demand for regulated client custody, settlement and prime services. On to client growth. We've seen tremendous growth in our client base over time due to a number of factors. In 2025, we saw benefits from expanding internationally, which has helped us win more global clients. In 2026, we are focused on expanding Bitgo's role in institutional market infrastructure by increasing our market share in OTC and derivatives while continuing to build next-generation wallet capabilities. At the same time, we're also investing in agentic wallet infrastructure that enables programmable, automated interactions with digital assets, supporting more sophisticated trading, settlement and treasury use cases for institutional clients. Finally, product expansion. During the first half of 2025, we launched our Stablecoin as a Service and our crypto as a Service. We started as the issuer for USD1, which has grown to over $5 billion in market cap since its launch, making one of the fastest-growing stablecoins of all time. We also announced recently that SoFi selected Bitgo's Stablecoin as a Service platform for their SoFi USD stablecoin. Further, we started off 2026 with the launch of our derivatives business, which we believe substantially improves our trade offerings for 2026. So far, we've seen roughly $3 billion in notional trading volume and over $3 million in revenue. We also see opportunities to expand our lending and trading offerings as well as enter tokenized equities as real-world asset tokenization has surpassed $25 billion as of July 2025. Looking ahead, we believe growing regulation of the digital asset industry in the U.S. as evidenced by the passage of the GENIUS Act and ongoing discussions on the CLARITY Act positions us well to increase our total addressable market. As more regulation is in place, we expect to see more traditional firms come to us looking to get involved in the digital asset industry with solutions that are secure and safe. We're seeing this now with our ecosystem team in support of the Canton network, a blockchain designed for traditional finance, where Bitgo has been the sole qualified custodian for some time. All these efforts will help power our product expansion strategy. We also secured exciting partnerships in 2025 that meaningfully raised our profile, including with Fidelity and Bitcoin. We started 2026 off strong. We're supporting Investify with nationwide digital asset investing for banks and credit unions. We're selected for custody and staking with Fidelity's Solana ETF as well as being named for the Bitcoin ETF, and we are accelerating our global ETF partnership with 21 shares. This is a particularly exciting opportunity as we've seen ETF client count grow over 200% year-over-year. Finally, we can't ignore what's coming with tokenized equities. We see several models emerging to tokenize traditional U.S. equities and all of them require the infrastructure that Bitgo has been building. We're proud to be the custodian on the Figure platform, which launched earlier this year to directly issue equities on blockchain through Figures open network. To conclude, I'm proud of our achievements in the fourth quarter and full year 2025, and I'm incredibly excited about the start of our journey as a public company. Being public adds another layer of rigor to our business as we continue to operate with transparency and security. We also believe that access to public markets reinforces Bitgo as the steady-state infrastructure player for institutions. I'm confident Bitgo is uniquely positioned within the crypto industry as the digital asset infrastructure company, and we have the right strategy in place to drive growth and deliver significant value for our shareholders. Finally, I want to thank the Bitgo team for their continued hard work and dedication to our company and mission that's made executing our IPO and achieving our strong financial results possible. I now turn it over to Ed.