BitGo Holdings, Inc.

You know, and that's only some of it at least, right? There's many more.

But I guess loosely speaking, you've got go to a custodian and pay them, right? Like the BitGo's, the Coinbase custodies, the Anchorages of the world, the Fidelity digital assets, the Fireblocks, etc.

Then you've got sort of, you know, get like a guided multi-sig kind of solution, right? Like yourself, like others out there.

Casa, AnchorWatch, there's a whole bunch.

Ripple has received conditional approval for a similar charter.

Circle and BitGo have received final approval for theirs.

Kraken parent Payward and crypto infrastructure provider Zero Hash has also submitted applications.

So everybody's-- th-this is the, the new Bitcoin treasury company, y'all.

Part five of Fintech Forward: Institutional Trading and Market Infrastructure.

BitGo, a publicly traded digital asset infrastructure company, completed its acquisition of NYDIG's institutional trading business on August twenty-seventh.

A deal worth about forty-two and a half million dollars in cash and equity.

Not a massive number, but a meaningful move.

It brings roughly thirty experienced NYDIG employees, along with about two hundred and fifty institutional client relationships directly into BitGo's platform.

NYDIG's institutional desk specialized in derivatives, structured products, and financing for asset managers, hedge funds, corporates, and family offices.

Exactly the sophisticated toolkit BitGo wanted to add.

And the timing lines up with a broader crypto market rebound, with Bitcoin recently climbing back above eighty thousand dollars.

At that time, uh, multisig was something that was just becoming accessible to kinda Bitcoin end users.

Prior to that, it was really more of an institutional thing with companies like BitGo providing multisig, you know, wallet solutions to Coinbase and, like, large, uh, institutions and companies operating in the Bitcoin space.

But this, uh, this software project called Specter Desktop was I think like the first to bring multisig to a place where it was doable for the average Bitcoiner.

And they also had kind of a companion project called the Specter DIY, which is still a thing.

There was just one recently, actually, as well, where everyone thought they did everything right and there was some code in there and We see these hacks play out all the time.

But, you know, eventually you get improvements and eventually you get to the point where, you know, multi-key signatures, institutional custody with players like BitGo and some others out there solve a lot of these issues much the same way that, you know, maybe eventually you get to the point of using different security and the financial side of things as well.

It's a hard metaphor to maybe get from like a box that you put behind a thing.

Yeah, I'm going to

You just go to all the news, you know, agencies and say, "Hey, we wanna s- you know, give away tokens to your, your viewers."

If, if I wanted to be able to give away tokens to people, I would just, uh, call Ledger or Trezor or BitGo.

[laughs]

Yeah.

not even BlackRock, because BlackRock uses qualified custodians.

So as far as I can tell, I think the only qualified custodians are Coinbase, BitGo, I think maybe Fidelity, and maybe Gemini.

But that's a different thing from just your average regular Bitcoin exchange.

They get special regulations and there's special processes and many of them are insured.

Well, there's a lot of

cold card people that blew their brains out last week that might disagree with you.

I think I'm still right that probably there is some security to obscurity, but I remember, for example, the involvement of BitGo in the Bitfinex hack, and I looked a little bit into this kind of big security company practices, and I'm sure that BitGo is a security nightmare.

and eventually it will be hacked.