Michael Belshe
Analyst · Chris Brendler with Rosenblatt Securities
Thank you, Rachel, and thank you all for joining us today. During the third quarter, we continued to strengthen Bitco's institutional platform and improve the operating efficiency of our business. Total revenue was $2.9 billion, net income was $44.1 million and adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $4.3 million. Our revenue performance reflected continued weakness in digital asset trading activity. Following the increase in digital asset prices in mid-August, approximately 2/3 of our clients who traded with us in Q2 traded less in Q3. Digital asset sales margin was approximately 15 basis points on the quarter, driven by a higher mix of activity from lower-margin stablecoins. On the expense side, we continued to improve operating efficiency with our second quarter cost reduction initiatives contributing to lower operating expenses. We also continued to make meaningful progress leveraging AI to improve engineering productivity. Since the beginning of the year, engineering output is up 65%, while we have simultaneously reduced engineering headcount, token costs and overall AI spend. Separately, we reduced cloud infrastructure costs by migrating select workloads from AWS to our own infrastructure. These advances are enabling us to accelerate innovation, expand our capabilities and offerings to our clients and continue playing a leading role in developing the market structure that will shape the future of this industry. Lastly, during the quarter, we repurchased approximately $25 million of our common stock under our $50 million authorization, reflecting our confidence in the BitGo long-term opportunity and our commitment to disciplined capital allocation. We will discuss the financial results in greater detail shortly. First, let me cover the key operating and strategic developments during the quarter. Turning to our operating highlights. At the end of Q3, using actual September 30 digital asset prices, assets on platform exceeded $83 billion and assets stayed to approximately $16 billion. On a reported basis, assets on platform declined from $65.2 billion to approximately $59.9 billion, while reported assets staked declined from $11.9 billion to approximately $10.5 billion. These declines reflect lower median digital asset prices used in our quarterly calculations rather than the decline in the amount of digital assets held by our clients. On a normalized basis, assets on platform increased slightly from $59.6 billion in Q2 to $59.9 billion sequentially, and normalized assets state increased from $10.4 billion to $10.5 billion. Beyond the strength of the assets on our platform, we also successfully expanded our global footprint by capitalizing on transparency, speed and compliance benefits that come with being a publicly traded company and a federally chartered National Trust Bank, BitGo Bank & Trust National Association. This included opening a larger Singapore office to satisfy the increased appetite for digital asset prime services amongst the family offices and ultra-high net worth individuals and successfully launching BitGo Korea as the first new Korean entity established by a global digital asset company by securing our vast license to provide custody and transfer services for local institutional and enterprise clients across finance and technology. While we have strengthened our operating model, we have continued investing in the capabilities that make our platform more valuable to clients. Everything we built in this quarter runs through a single idea. A client should be able to reach liquidity everywhere without moving assets off our platform. That is made possible by our proprietary GO network and 3 things further advanced it during the quarter. In July, we launched our global liquidity layer to BitGo Prime, providing clients access to exchanges, market makers and OTC counterparties through a single platform. We also expanded our liquidity network with the addition of Virtu Financial, a leading global market maker. In September, our relationship with Crossover Markets, a digital asset trading technology firm surpassed $2 billion in cumulative notional volume. That volume was executed on their electronic communication network, CROSSx, and all of it was settled through the Go network, which allows for digital asset movement in and out of cold storage. We also extended access to on-chain trading through integrations with Hyperliquid and Decibel. Eligible clients today can connect to these venues through their existing BitGo self-custody wallets while retaining established controls over wallet access and fund transfers. And finally, to close out the quarter, we completed our off-exchange settlement integration with OKX to expand to international markets, building on our existing U.S. relationship established back in April. This allows eligible institutions around the globe to access OKX's trading liquidity while keeping their digital assets stored at BitGo rather than moving them on to the exchange. The common threat with all of our services is the custody layer. Because the assets stay with us, we have the flexibility to address more unique requests from eligible institutional clients such as locking tokens and building structures with calls and puts against them and to also then use those positions as collateral for financing. None of that functionality exists as a stand-alone application. It required regulated infrastructure, secure custody and an interoperable platform that brings those capabilities together and lasting partnerships and integrations to activate this ecosystem. Security and asset protection have always been at the core of BitGo's business since our founding in 2013. We believe our reputation and track record for security is one of the primary reasons institutions choose BitGo. For more than a decade, we have continuously invested in building one of the industry's most secured custody platforms, combining regulated qualified custody with geographically distributed key management, multi-signature technology and rigorous operational controls. That's why we continue to be a household name among the large institutions and are now live with 33 different U.S. crypto ETFs with more currently onboarding. Recent security incidents across the industry reinforce why this matters. Only in crypto markets are institutions required to hold assets at individual exchanges to access their trading products and liquidity, exposing those assets to exchange counterparty risk. BitGo's Go network offers a differentiated approach. Institutions can manage their assets and regulated custody at BitGo while accessing the expanding network of trading venues, products and liquidity. As we add more exchanges and integrations, clients gain greater trading flexibility and settlement capabilities without having to distribute their assets across multiple exchange counterparties. We believe this combination of institutional-grade security, regulated custody and broader market access should represent the industry standard for digital asset market infrastructure. Even though the CLARITY Act was not enacted, BitGo is actively building the market structure that institutions demand now. Today's digital asset exchanges were built initially for retail. As institutions have entered the market, they've been perplexed as neither the operating capabilities, the regulatory standing or the market structure provided by those early exchanges met the rigorous standards of traditional financial institutions. One of those standards is the separation of duties. In traditional finance, trading venues never custody your assets. Execution, custody and clearing sit with separate institutions. That separation is deliberate because it means no single point of failure can take your assets down with it. This failure to segregate duties were one of the primary causes of historical failures at Mt. Gox, Quadriga CX, Coincheck and FTX. In each case, these failures of the exchange not only affected the market, but customer assets were lost. That's the challenge that BitGo's Go network solves with our off-exchange settlement product. OES lets you allocate assets for trading on an exchange while keeping your funds safe in BitGo, a regulated fiduciary and national trust bank. Let me demonstrate while using an account at OKX, a leading global crypto exchange that recently announced a major partnership with the New York Stock Exchange. With BitGo OES, the client instead leaves our assets in BitGo's regulated custody and virtually allocates a portion of their assets onto the exchange. My OKX account is connected to my GO account, which is enabled for OES and now appears next to my custody holdings. Nothing is moved. Now I'll allocate from my custody holdings into my OKX account. Watch the OKX balance, there it is instantly. That was a ledger movement on the GO network with no blockchain transaction and no waiting. My assets are still in BitGo custody in my name. What changed is that my OKX account now has a balance that I can trade with backed by those assets. The exchange then recognizes the client's balance from BitGo and allows the client to trade against it. From the trader's perspective, it's a normal deposit on the exchange, and that's by design. I can now trade directly on the exchange and BitGo isn't in the order or execution path. I can now trade however I want and run whatever strategies I want. Nothing about how I trade changes. I was able to connect to an exchange account, allocate assets instantly while keeping them in custody and trade against them with settlement running automatically in the background. This is what industry maturation looks like. This is what institutions demand. Institutions aren't lowering their standards just to enter crypto. Crypto's infrastructure is rising to meet their needs. OES, powered by the Go network, gives them that separation of execution and custody that they're used to now with the venues and liquidity of digital assets. Changing gears. In August, we acquired NYDIG's institutional trading business, which marks an important step in broadening BitGo's financial services offering. NYDIG was founded in 2017 and established itself as the industry's premier steward for institutional Bitcoin mandates. We completed the acquisition on August 27 and has since launched BitGo Global Markets, adding expertise in derivatives, structured products and financing, along with established institutional client relationships. These capabilities complement our existing platform, expanding the range of financial services we can offer institutional clients and creating additional opportunities to deepen those relationships over time. Today, BitGo supports nearly 100 different protocols and over 2,800 tokens, which significantly expands NYDIG's product offerings. The team is also central to this opportunity. Pete Janney spent 15 years at Credit Suisse running equity derivatives businesses and is now the Head of BitGo Global Markets. He leads an established team of trading, technology and operations professionals who joined BitGo through the acquisition. For BitGo's existing clients, NYDIG's offerings introduce additional yield generation opportunities, coupled with hedging and financing solutions, all supported by a well-experienced team in structuring solutions around institutional needs. We expect to improve operating efficiency as we integrate the business and leverage our existing technology, operations and compliance infrastructure. I'll hand the call over to Chen Fang, our Chief Revenue Officer, to discuss our tokenized equities commercial priorities and how we intend to bring those capabilities to clients.