Michael Belshe
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Your line is open, please go ahead
Thank you, Rachel, and thank you everyone for joining us. We delivered strong underlying business performance in Q1 despite continued softness across the broader digital asset market. While market activity created pressure on our headline financial results, underlying monetization across the businesses remained strong and we continued to gain market share across assets under custody, trading volume and several of our product verticals during the quarter. We also continued to invest across product platform and go to market capabilities, while making meaningful progress across several strategic growth areas that we believe will matter over the long term. Before I go deeper into the quarter, I want to address an important point regarding the accounting presentation of our results as we expect this will be an area of investor focus. BitGo today operates multiple businesses across trading, staking, financing, stablecoin infrastructure, settlement, and other related services. Under GAAP, different parts of the platform are recognized differently for accounting purposes, with certain activities reflected on a gross basis and others reflected on a net basis. As the business continues to scale and diversify, reported revenue alone does not always capture the underlying economics or monetization profile of the platform. At the January, we launched derivatives, within our digital asset sales business. Adoption has been encouraging, with approximately $3 billion in notional derivatives trading volume in Q1 alone. As a result, a portion of our client activity shifted from spot trading to derivatives products.That mix shift matters when evaluating our reported revenue. Because spot trading activity is reflected on a gross basis while the derivatives are reported on a net basis. As a result, the sequential decline in total revenue does not fully reflect the underlying platform economics. And reported revenue comparisons to prior periods are not directly comparable. More broadly, we believe investors should evaluate the business through the underlying margins, take rates, and net economics after direct transaction related costs associated with each of our core revenue streams. We are building institutional grade digital asset infrastructure, the secure regulated control layer that institutions rely on to build within digital assets. Our clients increasingly want integrated workflows across regulated custody, trading, financing, settlement, stablecoin infrastructure, and related services through a single trusted partner. We continued to strengthen that foundation throughout Q1, and we believe its importance will only increase as the market matures. We view custody as the entry point to the broader Bitcoin platform, and the foundation of our client relationships. Clients establish trust, bring assets onto the platform, and increasingly expand into our other products and services with a single integrated framework. This land and expand strategy is central to how we deepen client engagement. It's how we increase workflows across the platform and drive long term platform value. We also continue to see growing participation in the space from traditional financial institutions. Including asset managers, issuers, and other large counterparties. In our view, this remains 1 of the most important long term tailwinds for BitGo. These institutions are generally not building infrastructure from scratch. They are looking for trusted partners that can support digital asset adoption in a regulated and scalable way. This is exactly where BitGo is focused and where we believe we are differentiated. Our advantage is the combination of regulatory standing security architecture, and the breadth of capabilities we provide within a single integrated platform. Operationally, this was reflected in a continued deepening of client engagement across the platform increasing our number of clients served to 5,569 up 42% year-over-year, and users to 1.2 million despite broader market headwinds. Reported assets on platform at the end of Q1 were approximately $63 billion and reported assets staked were $11.8 billion both down from prior periods in dollar terms, primarily as a result of lower digital asset prices during the quarter. Because digital asset prices can materially impact reported asset values, we also evaluate underlying asset growth on a price normalized basis. We believe this more accurately reflects the fundamental growth of the business, client inflows, and BitGo's continued market share gains independent of the market price movement. Using current quarter digital asset prices across all periods, normalized assets on platform actually grew 29% year-over-year and 10% sequentially. Normalized stake balances grew 21% year-over-year and 27% sequentially. Bitcoin and Ethereum balances on the platform grew 131% year-over-year, and 7% sequentially. Taken together, we believe these demonstrate continued underlying momentum across the business despite the broader market volatility. Let's now dive into some key operational and commercial highlights from Q1. A key focus throughout Q1 was continuing to broaden the reach of our institutional platform through expanded commercial relationships and partnerships. For example, in Q1, we significantly expanded our partnership with 21shares, one of the world's largest issuers of cryptocurrency exchange traded products. This highlights the underlying demand for regulated crypto exposure in key markets around the world including throughout Europe, and builds upon Bitcoin's existing markets. Additionally, just a few weeks ago, we announced plans with OKX, a leading crypto exchange, to bring automated off exchange settlement infrastructure to institutional clients trading on OKX in The U.S. This is an example of BitGo helping solve structural challenges for institutional trading, which has historically required institutions to prefund assets on exchanges and take counterparty risk against those exchanges. It addresses the growing demand from institutions to separate custody from trading risk. We believe this is a major milestone for the industry, clearly establishing BitGo as the leader in institutional settlement. Beyond these announced partnerships, we also deepened relationships across a broader set of institutional clients, exchanges, asset managers and ecosystem partners during the quarter. Including several strategic engagements that have not yet been publicly disclosed. These partnerships are important not simply because of their headline value, but because they reflect the increasingly strategic role BitGo plays within the institutional digital asset workflows. They demonstrate that institutions are choosing BitGo, not only for custody, but as a premier, core infrastructure partner to support broader operational and financial activity. Throughout the quarter, we continued to extend out product capabilities into strategic growth areas. As I touched on earlier, we launched derivatives trading in January to support growing client demand for tools that help manage volatility, hedge exposure, generate yield, and structure risk more efficiently. Adoption in first quarter of launch has been encouraging, and we have already seen meaningful engagement across the platform. Importantly, some existing spot clients are now incorporating derivatives into broader workflows within BitGo, which is exactly the type of cross product adoption we want to drive over time. Stablecoins are another area where we made meaningful progress and where we continue to see significant long term opportunity. We have said consistently that stablecoin infrastructure can become one of the most important growth areas for BitGo over time, and this quarter reinforced that view. Stablecoin infrastructure is one of the clearest examples of how BitGo's platform extends beyond trading into broader financial and payments workflows. During and shortly after quarter end, we launched BitGo Mint, a one-stop portal where clients can mint, burn, and convert stablecoins from one type to another. We also continue to support clients and partners across reserve management, transaction processing, and the broader operational stack around stablecoins. When we look at client conversations today, the range of stablecoin use cases is getting broader across payments, treasury management, settlement, tokenized asset infrastructure, and embedded financial applications. We believe BitGo is well positioned to benefit from these trends, and we are pleased to announce several stablecoin related commercial partnerships, including with (sic) [ Stable T ], SoFi, and The Better Money Company. On financing and broader institutional workflows, we launched our unified financing platform and further expanded prime services' capabilities including additional risk management, structured products, financing, and treasury tools. These investments are strategically important. Each time we add a new capability, that helps clients keep more workflows inside the BitGo ecosystem. We deepen client engagement, increase the overall utility of the platform, and make BitGo more central to how those clients operate. Geographic expansion has also remained an important priority, This quarter, BitGo was named Issuer and Primary Custodian for FYUSD, a U.S. Dollar backed stablecoin designed for institutional adoption across Asian markets. In Europe, beyond the 21shares partnership, we added new traders to BitGo Prime's liquidity network in April, improving execution for our clients, on a regulated infrastructure. I would like to now provide some context on the financial results before I hand this over to Ed for more detailed discussion. We were not insulated from the market environment. Softer market conditions reduced activities in parts of the business and the non-cash markdown on our digital assets treasury weighed on GAAP earnings. However, despite this environment, the underlying economics of the business remained resilient relative to broader market conditions, as they were supported by continued market share gains, improved monetization across several of our core business lines, and ongoing client engagement across the platform. At the same time, we continue to invest in the strategic areas we believe will drive durable long term growth, such as product, platform, regulatory capability, and go to market execution. Having operated through up and down cycles in our 13-year history, we believe periods like this often create the best opportunities to strengthen the business and deepen our long term competitive position. Looking ahead, some parts of the business remain sensitive to market activity and token prices, while other parts are benefiting from onboarding, product expansion and continued traction with clients and partners. Ed will take you through that in more detail, including the financial bridge for the quarter and the key drivers across each business line. Before I hand it over, I want to close with a broader perspective on where we see the industry heading. Institutions continue to move into digital assets. Stablecoins continue to become more relevant to real world payments and financial workflows. Tokenization continues to create new infrastructure needs. At the same time, regulatory clarity continues to improve across key jurisdictions, including constructive momentum in The United States around market structure and digital asset legislation such as the CLARITY Act. We believe greater regulatory clarity is one of the key factors that can further accelerate institutional adoption and BitGo's total addressable market over time. Particularly as traditional financial institutions seek clearer regulatory frameworks before committing additional capital and resources into the digital asset market. As the market matures, clients increasingly want trusted, regulated, integrated partners rather than fragmented piecemeal solutions. We believe those structural trends continue to support the long term demand environment for BitGo. Periods like this often separate businesses that are simply exposed to market activity from businesses that are building durable value. Our role is not to call the market. Our job is to continue strengthening the platform, deepening the client relationships, and positioning the business to emerge stronger as adoption expands. We did that in Q1. Now I will turn it over to Ed.