BTGO Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 13, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Neutral Sentiment: BitGo said Q1 operating momentum remained strong despite softer crypto markets, with clients served up 42% year over year to 5,569 and normalized assets on platform and staked balances still growing on a price-adjusted basis.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company highlighted early traction in derivatives trading, which generated about $3 billion of notional volume in its first quarter and helped lift digital asset sales margin to 32 basis points.
  • Positive Sentiment: Stablecoin-as-a-Service was a standout growth area, with revenue up 44% sequentially and management pointing to strong partner demand, new commercial deals, and product launches like BitGo Mint and Burn Center.
  • Positive Sentiment: BitGo emphasized expanding institutional partnerships, including a broader relationship with 21Shares and plans with OKX for off-exchange settlement, which management framed as evidence of growing demand for regulated infrastructure.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Reported profitability was pressured by market weakness and one-time costs, with adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.7 million and GAAP net loss of $60.7 million, though the company expects expenses to ease in Q2 as IPO-related and stock-based compensation normalizes.
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Earnings Conference Call
BTGO Q1 2026
00:00 / 00:00

There are 16 speakers on the call.

Speaker 9

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to BitGo first quarter 2026 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will have a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the call over to Rachel Dye, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 12

Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining BitGo's Q1 2026 earnings conference call. Our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, including those regarding our future operating results and financial condition, such as our business strategy, market growth, and objectives for future operations. Actual results may vary materially from today's statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ are included in our SEC filings, including those that are stated in the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, and in our other filings with the SEC. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements. Additionally, the matters we discuss today will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures.

Speaker 12

Reconciliations of any non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are set forth in our earnings press release. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for GAAP measures. Joining me today on the call are Mike Belshe, founder and CEO, as well as Edward Reginelli, CFO. With that, I will now turn the call over to Mike.

Speaker 9

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.

Speaker 9

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. 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 start of 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.

Speaker 9

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 BitGo platform and the foundation of our client relationships.

Speaker 9

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 one 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.

Speaker 9

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.

Speaker 9

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 quarter one. A key focus throughout Q1 was continuing to broaden the reach of our institutional platform through expanded commercial relationships and partnerships.

Speaker 9

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 BitGo'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 pre-fund 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.

Speaker 9

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 our 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.

Speaker 9

Adoption in the 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 is 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.

Speaker 9

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're pleased to announce several stablecoin-related commercial partnerships, including with StableC, 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.

Speaker 9

Geographic expansion has also remained an important priority. This quarter, BitGo was named issuer and primary custodian for FYUSD, a US 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'd like to now provide some context on the financial results before I hand this over to Edward Reginelli for a 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.

Speaker 9

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 continued 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 multiple 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.

Speaker 9

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 U.S. 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.

Speaker 9

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'll turn it over to Ed.

Speaker 6

Thank you, Mike, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Let me start with the consolidated financial view and then walk through each of our major offerings. In the first quarter, total revenue was $3.8 billion, up 113% year-over-year and down 39% sequentially. The year-over-year increase reflects a larger digital asset sales business and a broader contribution from Stablecoin-as-a-Service relative to prior year quarter. The sequential decline was primarily the result of lower digital asset sales activity in a soft crypto market environment. As Mike noted, the headline percentage change overstates the decline in trading revenue as a portion of spot trading activity has shifted to derivatives, which are reported on a net rather than gross basis.

Speaker 6

For that reason, we do not think that analyzing total revenue alone fully captures the underlying economics of the quarter. While total revenue declined 39% sequentially, direct costs also declined at a similar rate. At the same time, margins and take rates improved across digital asset sales, staking, and Stablecoin-as-a-Service. As a result, the sequential decline in total revenue was more pronounced than the change in the underlying economics of the business. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $1.7 million in the quarter, compared with a positive $3.9 million in Q1 of last year and a positive $12.1 million in Q4. The year-over-year and sequential change reflected weaker market conditions, lower subscriptions and services revenue, and continued investment in the business.

Speaker 6

It also included approximately $3 million of one-time legal, professional costs, and other one-time charges associated with the IPO process and other strategic initiatives. GAAP net loss was $60.7 million in the quarter, compared with a net loss of $25.7 million in Q1 of last year and a net loss of $50 million in Q4. The primary driver of that result was negative mark-to-market adjustments on digital assets, as well as elevated IPO-related stock-based compensation expense, which we expect to normalize from Q1 2026 levels going forward. Let me now move to the offerings. Starting with digital asset sales. Revenue for digital asset sales was $3.7 billion, up 128% year-over-year and down 39% sequentially.

Speaker 6

While overall trading activity reflects a weaker market environment, the underlying economics of the business improved during the quarter. On a normalized basis, excluding the accounting impact of the derivatives mix shift, our underlying trading economics outperformed the broader market sequentially and significantly outperformed on a year-over-year basis. We believe this reflects continued market share gains in institutional digital asset trading. Overall margin was 32 basis points compared with 20 basis points a year ago and 24 basis points in Q4, primarily driven by the contribution from derivatives activity following the launch of the offering on January 1 of this year. Strategically, we view derivatives as an important extension of BitGo's platform. Clients increasingly want integrated workflows that include risk management, hedging, yield generation, and structured solutions alongside spot execution. Expanding those capabilities strengthens client engagement and increases strategic relevance of our trading platform over time.

Speaker 6

Turning to staking. Revenue was $49.4 million, down 66% year-over-year and 15% sequentially, primarily reflecting lower token prices. Staking take rates increased 16.1% from 7.6% in Q4 and 12.5% in the prior year quarter, driven by additional token onboarding and a more favorable validator mix, including the contribution of the higher economics of the Canton related activity. While the current mix may vary over time, the broader takeaway is that we are improving the economic quality of this business line while continuing to expand token support. Subscriptions and services revenue was $25.6 million, up 11% year-over-year and down 35% sequentially. The sequential decline primarily reflected a lower level of one-time ecosystem and implementation-oriented projects compared with Q4, when activity in this area was elevated.

Speaker 6

While these projects are not recurring in nature, they remain strategically important because they often support token onboarding, client implementations, and broader downstream revenue opportunities across the platform. We do not view the sequential revenue decline as representative of the underlying health of the recurring revenue base. Stablecoin-as-a-Service continued to be the bright spot during the quarter. Revenue was $38.2 million, up 44% sequentially. Take rate improved to 7.4% from 5.5% in Q4. Growth was driven by continued client adoption, product enhancements, and new partnerships. We view stablecoin infrastructure as a significant long-term growth opportunity for BitGo, supported by expanding adoption across payments, settlement, treasury management, and broader financial applications. Interest income was $0.9 million, up 259% year-over-year and 89% sequentially.

Speaker 6

Turning now to expenses. The most important point is that the quarter reflects both temporary and strategic factors. We incurred approximately $3 million of one-time legal and professional fees related to the IPO process and other strategic initiatives. Our stock-based compensation of $11.2 million was also elevated during the quarter compared to $0.8 million in Q4 of 2025. We expect a moderation in share base expense on a go-forward basis. During the quarter, we continued to invest in talent, product development, and platform capabilities as part of a deliberate long-term strategy. We are managing the business with discipline. We are not managing the business to maximize one quarter of profitability at the expense of our long-term growth opportunity.

Speaker 6

Our balance sheet remains strong, including approximately $186.6 million of cash and $167.1 million of Bitcoin held in treasury on the balance sheet as of the quarter end. Combined with our capital-light model, this provides the flexibility to invest through the current cycle, support client activity across the platform, and pursue strategic growth opportunities from a position of strength. I'd also like to briefly touch on the higher interest expense in the quarter. This reflects funding used to support customer borrowing and lending activity on the platform. Importantly, this was operational in nature rather than corporate financing and helps enable revenue-generating client workflows within the business. Moving now to our outlook for Q2 2026.

Speaker 6

Based on quarter-to-date trends, we are assuming that digital asset market conditions will remain broadly consistent with current levels, building on the stronger performance observed at the end of the first quarter. Digital asset sales revenue is expected to remain broadly consistent with Q1, with margins anticipated to be comparable, assuming a similar mix of derivatives and spot trading activity. Current trends indicate strong year-over-year growth for the quarter. Staking revenue is expected to remain broadly consistent with Q1, supported by continued growth in staked assets despite ongoing price volatility in key tokens. Subscriptions and services revenue is expected to grow sequentially on a reported basis, supported by client growth across custody and wallets, while also benefiting from non-recurring ecosystem and implementation-related work. Stablecoin-as-a-Service revenue is expected to grow modestly sequentially, supported by ongoing client adoption and new partnerships.

Speaker 6

Total expenses for the second quarter, excluding direct costs associated with digital asset sales, staking, and Stablecoin-as-a-Service, are expected to decrease from Q1 levels, which were driven by IPO-related charges during the quarter and normalization of stock-based compensation. The company will continue to invest in long-term platform growth and go-to-market execution. With that, I'll turn it back to the operator to open the call for questions.

Speaker 10

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Please limit yourself to 1 question and 1 follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. Please pick up your handset when asking your question. If you're muted locally, remember to unmute your device. Please stand by now while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of James Yarrow with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Good afternoon, Mike. I'd love to just get a little bit of an update around the stablecoins and service demand from partners, and I guess how this has evolved as the Clarity Act progresses. Maybe longer term, how would you expect the act passing to impact the demand?

Speaker 9

Hey, thanks, James. I appreciate the question. Good to speak to you all. In terms of stable coins, continues to grow strong. I mean, basically everybody's out there looking at Clarity and Genius, which doesn't allow interest. If you have a broad distribution of users at your bank or financial institution, you're faced with a choice. Do you, A, launch your own, your own stable coin and then be able to participate in yield, use it with your partners, use it with your business in some way? Do you give that up to somebody else who's going to instead take that?

Speaker 9

In general, just strong interest. I know others have cited, you know, lengthy pipeline. We've got a couple of deals we can't announce yet, but continues to look really positive. Also, we did just extend our USD1 contract, so we're happy that that partnership has been doing fantastic.

Speaker 7

Thanks, Mike. That's really helpful. Maybe just as a follow-up, sort of a similar question around tokenization facilitating, you know, tokenization projects and how you see the opportunity set for your business there.

Speaker 9

Look, I think tokenized equities have really exploded in the last six months. There's at least four kind of different models for how to bring tokenized equities to market. We're proud that we participated, well, actually we're participating with all of them. You know, we are infrastructure. One of the benefits of being infrastructure is that, you know, we participate on all of these, and then we work with the clients to kind of forge them. I think the market's gonna figure out which of these work best. You know, the first one that we're proud of is, you know, we are the sole custodian within the Figure Markets ecosystem. They started, I think in February. Obviously they've got one model which uses, you know, Provenance and Figure ATS.

Speaker 9

That's been kicked off. On top of that, there's tokenized wrappers that exist. There's a couple of different players pursuing that. You saw DTCC just announcing that they've got a plan to go to market. We will be participating with all these, and we think it opens up our business tremendously, you know, kind of towards how we grow in the direction of prime brokerage. Anyway, we're very excited about this. We're heavily investing in it and more to come.

Speaker 7

Very helpful. Thanks, Mike.

Speaker 10

Your next question comes from the line of Peter Christiansen with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 11

Thank you. I appreciate the question here. Mike, back on Stablecoin-as-a-Service, to what degree is BitGo involved in the design and construction of the networking? Meaning connecting with other partners which may not be a part of the BitGo client ecosystem. My thinking is there's an opportunity from a lead gen perspective for services with Stablecoin-as-a-Service emanating from one particular client to others. Just wondering if you could provide some color on that. I'm curious on any learnings here on scaling this business and what it could mean for potentially launching L1 as a service at some point. Thank you.

Speaker 9

Great. Thanks, Pete. Let's see. On the first point about stablecoins, I'm glad you're hitting this. It's a little bit of a subtle point, you know, one of the advantages that BitGo has, you know, with the large client base, is that anyone that launches their stablecoin directly with BitGo immediately plugs into an entire network. If you recall, you know, at the bottom of our stack, we have our self-custody wallet platform that's distributed all over the planet. Hundreds of exchanges and broker-dealers are using that. As soon as you light up on the BitGo API, you light up on all of those parties.

Speaker 9

Additionally, you know, I think, you know, some of the traditional folks that are coming into the space are a little bit more, if you want to use Peter Thiel's analogy of zero to one, they're really more like the one to many, and BitGo's kind of like the zero to one. I do think it's a different skill set of how do you take a product which currently isn't deployed, and get the flywheel spinning and grow it. BitGo's got tremendous reach into the DeFi ecosystem, into the crypto ecosystem. Obviously we've got partners and hedge funds and venture funds and all others. When folks use the BitGo platform for stablecoins, we definitely are actively working with helping them.

Speaker 9

You've seen, historically there's been a few stablecoins that launched several years ago, and they pretty much stayed kind of at zero for a long period of time. That's because of not having, necessarily a really good go-to-market plan. We definitely help our clients with this. We're motivated and interested and incentivized to do so. I think that's one of the advantages of using the BitGo stablecoin platform. I'm sorry, you had a second part of the question. What did you ask again?

Speaker 11

Oh, on-

Speaker 9

Yeah

Speaker 11

the potential of taking the learnings and the capabilities that you have with Stablecoin-as-a-Service to potentially offering L1 as a service at some point.

Speaker 9

Oh, for BitGo?

Speaker 11

Correct

Speaker 9

With that topic's come up quite a bit. I think, you know, some of the new L1s, particularly around stablecoins, are hitting a new need, that, you know, kind of the first generation of L1s didn't solve, and that's the ability to pay fees in kind of the stablecoin. Both Tempo and ARK, as you're probably aware, you know, if you're moving your stablecoin, whatever fees you pay to the chain, you actually can pay in the stablecoin itself. Whereas when stablecoins are moving on Ethereum or Solana or whatnot, you always have to, in addition to having the stablecoin, you have to have a little bit of the L1's token. I think these innovations are going to frankly, they're kind of just required.

Speaker 9

I mean, it's annoying and a nuisance to have to pay kind of a foreign fee in order to move a stablecoin. As for BitGo's own ambitions, there could be something. We have not announced anything publicly yet, you know, stay tuned.

Speaker 11

Thank you, Mike.

Speaker 10

Your next question comes from the line of George Sutton with Craig-Hallum. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 14

Awesome. Thanks. Hey, guys, this is Logan hopping on for George. Mike, I wanted to start with sort of a specific one on Canton. Obviously you were an early supporter there, and you've made a few announcements since kind of this year expanding that partnership. Seems like a blockchain that we keep hearing a lot about, and it's kind of getting more business. I wondered if you could just walk through some of the different ways that you're set to benefit from their growth, and just kind of give us a sense for where that relationship could go in the future.

Speaker 9

Sure. Thank you for the question. Let's see, Canton, I mean, you know, has been a big supporter of digital asset, DRW Don Wilson, for quite some time. We're proud to be the only qualified custodian on the network today. Canton deserves credit for really addressing early some of the institutional complaints that come with building applications on blockchain, in particular privacy, in particular, you know, how you receive assets. You know, there's been concern about dust transactions on Bitcoin, Ethereum, et cetera. They solve these problems, they've been able to bring in a number of people.

Speaker 9

They also are, I think, having kind of a second mover advantage in terms of understanding how to distribute their own token in a way that's fair and helps incentivize the network and grow before having it kind of hit the market and liquidate and cause issues. I think they're well-poised. You know, the privacy, they're kind of the only permission privacy chain in town right now. With the growth they've had, I think they're looking good. In terms of BitGo, one of the things that's interesting about BitGo and often difficult to describe is going into depth on a particular coin or an asset.

Speaker 9

I mean, we'll say that, you know, "Hey, you know, BitGo has wallet support for," pick your favorite coin, or, "We have staking support." It's easy to say we have the wallet, we have the staking, but there's also a lot of depth that goes into that. Like, what features do you support on that coin? You know? How many staking providers are you interoperable with? Like, what flexibility do clients have? Part of how we grow is by making sure that we can meet all of our clients' needs. One example specific to Canton, it's kind of a funny one, I think, but it's also really important. I mentioned these dust transactions.

Speaker 9

You know, traditional finance is often worried, well, like, you know, what happens when you're a financial institution and you receive these dust transactions on this open network? What if you didn't want it? What if it's from, you know, a bad guy? How do you deal with that? Now, my own personal opinion is that in practice, these are not significant issues, but these really do trip up regulators, legal teams, you know, extensively. Canton has a feature where you can accept, you know, all the deposits and prove them. BitGo's not just integrated with the chain, we actually implement that feature. That particular feature creates the demand for more features.

Speaker 9

It turns out that it's a little bit annoying to constantly have to approve every transaction that comes in, so then they want whitelisting and, you know, ability to kind of approve those in batch and things like that. We build those. I think we're well-poised. I think we're happy that we have the large network on Canton, in terms of, you know, we're able to integrate with Go Network and other things on the go forward, that should just continue to expand.

Speaker 14

Got it. Helpful color. Second, just a quick one for me. I mean, kinda putting the reporting differences aside, are you able to just kinda walk through how the net economics on spot volume compared to derivatives volume, compare for you guys? Just wanna get a better understanding of as this shifts over time, kind of what we'd expect to see on that net revenue line.

Speaker 9

I'll hand it to Ed in just a second, but some quick color. I think in the crypto markets, you will see the same thing that's happened in other markets. You know, derivatives tend to be a better way, more economic way to trade in the industry. The volumes on the derivatives side will continue to grow and eventually far outpace the spot markets. We already saw in Q1 some conversion from spot market trading over to derivatives trading, which was expected. We hope to continue to grow that. For just kind of 1 quarter of offering, we think that the results were pretty good. We think that that will continue.

Speaker 9

Of course, you know, kind of our margin on a derivative product is higher than what you would have in spot markets. We're happy about that as well. Ed, do you leave anything off?

Speaker 6

No, I mean, we're, as Mike mentioned, very excited to extend some more product within our trading platform. We've really strong client adoption, and we're still very excited about the spot trading business. Year-over-year, we have seen tremendous growth. We did go down sequentially, and that was really just due to the fact that in Q4, we had exceptional volume from a few key clients. Overall, you know, we're excited about trading and expanding our capabilities and extending product launches there.

Speaker 14

Okay. Got it. Thanks, guys.

Speaker 10

Your next question comes from the line of Brett Knoblauch with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Operator

Perfect. Thanks, guys, for taking my questions. Maybe just on kind of the segment stuff, the subscription services sequential decline was a bit more than I was anticipating, and I know you guys called out maybe it was due to lower onboarding or implementation fees. Could you maybe provide some just color on the underlying strength in that business? I know the number of kind of clients continue to increase. You know, how did the subscription services do outside those maybe, you know, one-time non-recurring fees?

Speaker 9

Thanks, Brett Knoblauch. First off on the 1-time recurring fees, just so people understand what those are. You know, as we take on new coins and build them, sometimes they've got, you know, particular technology components that are extensive. We do charge blockchains and others onboarding fees to do that. However, you know, where we really wanna make, you know, our impact in the world is with the ongoing recurring revenues that come from real clients. Yes, the 1-time components came down. On the subscriptions and services, you know, I think it's been in line with where we would have expected it to be, other than that we had less of the 1-time fees. The other thing I would point out is increasingly we are wanting to move the revenue kind of up the stack.

Speaker 9

As I've mentioned before, you know, the custody fees and subscription fees by themselves, you know, that's kind of a cost center to our clients. Paying fees as our clients are doing work with trading and with staking and with borrow and lend, et cetera, those are where they're making money. It's a much more palatable place for our clients to pay us fees. That does change the mix a little bit, and it's one of the challenges in describing the business is that we have multiple products and services. I don't have the stat, maybe Ed has the stat, but, you know, we shared previously, you know, about 72%, 73% of clients are using 2 or more products. Over half the clients using 3 or more products.

Speaker 9

We think that really if we can bring clients in and we lead with, you know, custody is the way they come in, and it's usually what we're known for, but they grow into these other products and services, and we think that's the strength. Ed?

Speaker 6

We've seen tremendous growth in number of clients utilizing our custody and wallet products, and that's somewhat of a recurring revenue stream. That story remains very strong. Again, the big story there was in Q4, we did experience a very large volume of ecosystem projects. Excluding that, the business performed very strong year-over-year, first of all, and then also sequentially. Overall, we're still very optimistic about our customer pipeline and that business, that part of our business growing.

Operator

Awesome. Then maybe if I could just follow up on the staking side. Yeah, go ahead, Mike.

Speaker 9

Yeah, go ahead.

Operator

Oh, I was gonna If you had another point on that, yeah.

Speaker 9

Sorry. You know, one of the things I would like to figure out how to do really well with all of you guys is, how do we differentiate the BitGo performance from, you know, the market price volatility performance? Obviously, we don't consider ourselves to be a huge impact on the latter, although hopefully we have an impact to some degree. Really we wanna focus on the former. The normalized numbers that we discussed on the call, I think looked pretty encouraging. As long as we are, and it doesn't really matter where you pin the prices to. You can pin it to the beginning of the period, the end of the period. In all cases, you know, we saw significant growth both on the assets on platform and also on the assets under stake.

Speaker 9

The revenue that we'll get on, you know, the, just the custody component will be down from the US dollar notional, sorry, the US dollar pricing. In terms of the actual assets on platform, we see good growth there. We're happy about that for the future.

Operator

Helpful. Just on the staking front, obviously asset stake decline, that's, you know, general declines in asset prices. It looked like the take rate there ticked up a good bit if I'm just doing kind of beginning of period and the period average, almost like doubled quarter-over-quarter, I guess. Did you guys tick up pricing on the staking side?

Speaker 9

We had a couple of different things. We had a change in the mix of some of the partners that we work with, and then also some of the coins are stronger in terms of the rates we get on those. Those have been positive for us. Lastly, as we did note on the call, on a normalized basis, the overall assets under stake did grow. Remember the assets that you stake is basically the non-Bitcoin assets, which is like the one set of assets that are even more volatile than Bitcoin. Ed?

Speaker 6

Doing, I guess the thing I will add to that is. What was your last comment, Mike?

Speaker 9

I think you covered it, Mike. You covered it.

Speaker 6

Okay. Yeah. All right. I knew what I was gonna say. The only thing I would add is in addition to a positive validator mix, as we get to a certain size and volume with certain coins, we're able to push a lot of that staking capability to our own nodes, where we appreciate a much higher margin. That's also helping support the margin growth.

Operator

That's a good slide. Thanks, Ed. Thank you, guys. I appreciate it.

Speaker 9

Great.

Speaker 10

Your next question comes from the line of Ed Engel with Compass Point. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Hi, thanks for taking my question. Question on the increased stablecoin take rate. Any more color on what's driving that? I know that there's moving pieces between partnership mix and then some transaction revenue. I just wanna get an idea if transaction revenue is actually starting to drive that business rather than just interest income. Thanks.

Speaker 9

Actually I think it's mostly that kickstarting the business. We actually gave some discounts kind of on the early piece when coins are growing, and then now we've kind of graduated beyond that. The take rate just goes up as a result of that. That's the main one. In terms of stablecoin conversions, we do a lot of stablecoin conversions. Those are relatively low margin. Those show up more in the trading side rather than under the stablecoin numbers.

Speaker 5

Great. Thanks for that. I guess on the OKX integration for off-exchange settlement, I mean, it kind of seems like it's just a matter of time before this structure becomes kind of the standard industry. Just curious, like, how do these integrations, I guess, help the business just economically? Is it more of a way to kind of gain and maintain market share, or actually able to monetize some of those trading fees?

Speaker 9

Yeah, great question. Look, part of it is you get the assets on platform, and then you have the opportunity to address those clients in many ways. We're trying to help make the settlement network just be the strongest, largest volume that's out there. The most important place to be is on the largest exchanges. You know, the big three is Binance and OKX and Bybit. This is one of the big ones, and we're really excited about the fact that we have it. Then, in terms of how we make money, I think one of the elements of the crypto industry that hasn't been fully considered, you know, through most of our 10-year history, is how to price risk.

Speaker 9

Remember, when you're doing trading, there's three components of pricing. Number 1 is, what's the cost of the underlying asset that you're trading? Number 2 is, how much profit do you wanna take? 5 bips, 10 bips, 100 bips? The third one is, what is your risk? Because crypto markets are highly volatile, relatively new, require pre-funding out of the exchanges, the measurement of that risk is super tough. Of course, the industry has seen big penalties, like what happened when FTX had a blowout, you know, back in 2022. The main thing that our clients get out of, you know, having off-exchange settlement is reduced risk and the ability to start actually measuring and quantifying the risk so that they can get their prices right.

Speaker 9

I think so far what's been happening is we have really wide margins on the, on the profit side, and then people just say, "Well, that's big enough. It'll cover some of the risks that I'm taking." Now with the ability to trade without having to pre-fund various venues, you take out that risk and you can start to quantify it for real. This is gonna bring prices kind of back. You know, we see Charles Schwab came in. I think were they gonna be at 75 basis points on their retail trading? Morgan Stanley has now announced that they're gonna do 50 bips on their retail trading.

Speaker 9

You know, as they bring their rates down, they are going to increasingly have to figure out how they're going to measure and control the risk that they're taking. I think they're gonna, they're gonna find BitGo's settlement network to be a very satisfying place to be.

Speaker 5

Great. Thank you.

Speaker 10

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Dobson with Clear Street. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Hey, good evening. Thanks for taking my question. At the top of the call, you spoke a little bit about growing your share of a client's business organically over time. Can you give us a little bit of color on what that looks like and how you're thinking about client acquisition costs?

Speaker 9

Yeah. Look, it's been one of Thank you, Brian. It's been one of our key metrics, you know, since our IPO day back in January, I mean, before that internally. Look, overall, the market is simply expanding. What started out, you know, a decade ago as primarily Bitcoin, then expanded into a few other assets, then ICOs, and now it's grown into stablecoins and DeFi. You know, it's about to go into tokenized equities. The more clients you have on platform, the more it means that your clients are gonna be able to match each other on the settlement network and whatnot. We look for partnerships where we can have a partnership that brings on more clients. The OKX platform, sorry, OKX integration is no exception.

Speaker 9

By doing that deal, we can now work to find clients that we have in common. Sometimes we're helping OKX with getting more clients, sometimes they're helping us with getting more clients. Basically anywhere that we can find a partnership where one client begets more clients, we consider that a win.

Speaker 1

Great. Thanks very much.

Speaker 10

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for the question here. Just maybe we talk about the loan book a little bit, how you're thinking about that strategically. You know, where it may go from here, how it's performing here in this spot volatility market, and then quick follow-up after that.

Speaker 9

Thanks, Joe. Ed, do you wanna answer on where we're at right now?

Speaker 6

Sure.

Speaker 9

I'll answer after that.

Speaker 6

The loan book is currently roughly around $200 million outstanding with client-facing. We believe there's an incredible opportunity ahead of us. I think we had mentioned, Joe, in the past that our problem is we have more demand than we have supply of dollars to lend. A lot of the clients are looking for US dollars to borrow. We try to find unique ways of bringing in additional dollars. Obviously, the IPO was very helpful in bringing in some additional funds to the company to support the program. We'll continue to keep building that program. Again, the opportunity that we see there is huge.

Speaker 9

And then, uh, just-

Speaker 8

Great

Speaker 9

Adding into this part why I'm excited about the tokenized equities is, I think, there's tremendous demand to borrow against fully collateralized, you know, fully collateralized positions against all kinds of things. While there was a healthy market, you know, borrowing against fully collateralized in Bitcoin, there's a lot more people that have equities that they would be willing to apply towards this than there are people that are holding just Bitcoin. We think it's gonna greatly grow the market once we've got tokenized equities on chain.

Speaker 8

That's great. I didn't actually think about that, Mike, and opening up that margin lending market on tokenized equities.

Speaker 9

Yeah

Speaker 8

Just, maybe, quick, maybe kind of talk about a little bit of the mechanics of maybe some of your customers switching some trading volume from spot to derivatives. You know, it feels like if they wanted to do derivatives trading volumes, they could perhaps have been doing those away from you, to begin with. Just, you know, wanted to drill down on the motivations of clients of, you know, of that mix shift from their end. Thank you very much.

Speaker 9

Thanks, Joe. Look, one of the least sexy things that we do, but probably the most important things that we do, is getting the regulatory right behind what we do at BitGo. Our clients very much appreciate that we are OCC chartered national bank. They very much appreciate the regulatory standing that we have across the globe, whether you're talking about Germany or Dubai or Singapore. In general, once they've gone through the onboarding and diligence process with BitGo, it's difficult to replicate that with multiple partners. You're absolutely right. They could have traded in derivatives last year or the year before with a number of different parties. Oftentimes, that means opening accounts offshore.

Speaker 9

Oftentimes that means just, you know, opening accounts with, crypto native firms that may not match the kind of profile that they're looking to work with. The desire to have this one stop where they come to BitGo, we are their counterparty, they know who we are, they've been through our insurance, they've been through our SOC 1, our SOC 2, and all of our regulatory analysis, and now they're ready to do these activities. You're right. They would've participated before. They just didn't have quite the right partner. And they're very happy to have BitGo helping.

Speaker 10

In the interest of time, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question only for the remainder of the Q&A. Your next question comes from the line of Chris Brendler with Rosenblatt. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 3

Hi. Thanks, good afternoon, guys. Just wanted to dig a little deeper on the derivatives business. Obviously it's still early days, but a good start for that business. I just wanted to know, you know, as you think about the impact on the net margin there, is it safe to assume that the increase you've seen there is the majority of the increase you've seen there, or maybe all of the increase we've seen in that net capture rate has been due to the addition of derivatives revenue without a denominator impact? Can you talk at all about, you know, how you expect that business to contribute in the second quarter? I also had one follow-up on the Stablecoin-as-a-Service business.

Speaker 3

Just, you know, sort of more detail on the growth in partners there and how the book will look as you kind of grow away from just having the World Liberty. You know, how significant are the non-World Liberty assets expected to be as you progress through the year? Thank you.

Speaker 6

Thank you, Chris. Mike, anything to add?

Speaker 6

Yes. The take rate or the margin that we saw during Q1, as we referenced, was benefiting from the net reporting of derivatives. If you just look at the spot business, it's very consistent to what we experienced in Q4. There, those margins haven't varied very much. We continue to experience that into the future. As we get more and more of the derivative trades, that will hopefully help influence our net take rate much higher to the future.

Speaker 9

On the stablecoins, I'm not sure how to quite answer it. We do have some clients that we can't preannounce. It's unfortunate. We can't announce clients that are not ready to be announced yet. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to ask you to stay tuned. On the I guess one thing I didn't mention, you probably have seen it, this last quarter, we did launch what we call our Mint and Burn Center. It's a place where all of our, you know, 5,600 clients can mint and burn directly in the assets that are straight from BitGo. We've got partnerships. You know, the intention is not to limit it to just the BitGo stablecoins. You can convert between stablecoins all kind of right there.

Speaker 9

Additionally, you can do it programmatically, so it's super easy. If you've got your agentic bots running, they can completely through API do these types of conversions as well. I think, there's probably more agentic announcements that have happened so far than than real meaningful deployments. We do see this as an important part for the future.

Speaker 10

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Dolev with Mizuho. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hey, guys. Really nice results here. Congrats from us. I have a question on the bank and trust. BitGo now holds bank and trust, national bank charter from the OCC. This puts you, in our view, in a pretty exclusive category amongst crypto native firms. Maybe beyond the obvious trust and compliance signaling, what does the charter concretely unlock in terms of new revenue lines? Thank you.

Speaker 9

Thanks for asking. Actually, by the way, one thing I'd like to impress upon folks that may not be aware of kind of BitGo's history, I think we might be the first OCC charter bank that converted in a day. You know, usually what happens is, there's a lot of people that are in the application process with the OCC. Usually what happens, you get a conditional approval, then it can be like nine, 12, 18 months while you go and build the necessities fee at the OCC level of a bank. In BitGo's case, we were conditionally approved. We had to write a check to fill the regulatory capital, the next day we were operating. You know, doing these activities is something we've been doing for a long time.

Speaker 9

To answer your question, the reason that's important is because, you know, when we built, you know, BitGo Trust Company out of South Dakota back in 2018, it was pretty limited in scope of what it could do. I mean, all we wanted to do was to be able to kind of hold these assets in a fiduciary manner, in a way that was bankruptcy remote, that was safe for our clients, our institutional clients to understand. Every time we wanted to do something new, it was, like, more licensing, it was more updates to the business plan, working with the regulators. As we went into the OCC process, you know, we put everything in there.

Speaker 9

From trading to staking to, of course, custody, et cetera, these are all things that the regulator is familiar with in our business. It's part of our business plan that the OCC has worked with us on. By the way, they've been great, really appreciative of their efforts there. Overall, we feel like we've got the best standing with that OCC charter and the business plan that's approved in there. It's pretty all-inclusive. I don't know if you had a particular area that you wanted to drill into, but I mean, look, obviously the services that we have up on top of custody already, those are where we're growing and this all grows towards prime brokerage.

Speaker 10

Your next question comes from the line of Cassie Chan with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 9

Please go ahead.

Speaker 2

Great, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask, you know, it seems like the number of clients continued to grow and ticked up again this quarter. How, if at all, have the profile of these clients have changed in terms of AUM, or are they actually using, you know, multiple products in addition to custody right from the start now? Just curious if that's evolved as well. Thank you.

Speaker 9

Thanks, Cassie. Well, as I mentioned earlier, look, we have a lot of crossover between our services for our clients. That continues to do well for us. We should probably measure it for the next reporting period. Maybe we'll talk about it next time more. It's all, I think, been positive. The profile of the client is changing in terms of we have this whole new addressable market, which is the traditional financial firms coming to BitGo.

Speaker 9

Also have some announcements here that are not yet announced yet, but deals that are already signed in ink, which you will be hearing about, I think, in this quarter, which are exciting from firms that, you know, just one year ago would not have been listed in any type of crypto or digital asset related product. We are seeing that shift. I do think clarity remains the next, I don't know if I wanna call it a hurdle, maybe the next graduation point where a number of maybe the more conservative firms will also be looking and solidifying their digital asset plans. Right now it seems like everybody's growing, and you can see there's a heated race among the new entrants to try to be fastest and the best.

Speaker 9

I think that is creating a bit of FOMO among those players that have not been in digital assets yet, and we are seeing all of those and all of those RFIs and all of those RFPs.

Speaker 10

Your final question comes from the line of Stephen Glagola with KBW. Your line is open.

Speaker 13

Hey, hi. Thanks, Mike, for the question. Can you unpack more on some of the prepared remarks around how are you guys are thinking about balancing the reinvestment in strategic growth on the initiatives around, you know, product, platform, regulatory capability that you called out, while also driving operating leverage for, you know, sustained, positive, and growing EBITDA over time? Thank you.

Speaker 9

We've been through, I think, 3 or 4 kind of up and down cycles in Bitcoin over the years. You know, sometimes these down cycles are the best times to be building. Especially, you know, AI is absolutely helping us on the build. We don't see any need for, like, additional costs of any material type. Of course, you're always watching to see, you know, where are the costs of the business. We did have one-time expenses around, you know, the IPO itself and some legal costs that are associated with that. I think those were typical. For the most part, like we're building. I think there is a strong demand for this tokenized equities component and, you know, being first.

Speaker 9

You know, one of the things we have is I think the broadest support of L1s and L2s of any major custodian, certainly much larger than Coinbase and Anchorage. Staying ahead there does require, you know, that we continue to build. We will continue to build there. Of course, we're always watching the bottom line. We wanna make sure that we are building a healthy business. I think that we're well within those parameters right now. As the market exits its bear cycle, I think you're gonna see real wins on all the economic measures out of the build.

Speaker 10

We have reached the end of the question and answer session. I will now turn the call back to Mike Belshe for closing remarks.

Speaker 9

Thanks everybody for joining us today. To close, I just want to come back to 3 points. 1st, underlying monetization has held up better than the gross revenue presentation would suggest. We are encouraged to see our team launching our derivatives trading products as we talk about our high overall margin and take rates across digital asset sales, taking and Stablecoin-as-a-Service are great. 2nd, most importantly, we continue to strengthen the business itself. We launched new capabilities, expanded business lines, we added clients and partners, we advanced the stablecoin infrastructure and continued investing in the people and the platform that we believe will drive long-term benefits and growth. That's the business we're building, and it's the lens through which we believe investors should evaluate our progress as well.

Speaker 9

Finally, BitGo remains uniquely positioned as the institutional-grade digital asset infrastructure platform, secure, regulated control layer for digital assets and all the new entrants see that capability. Our advantage is the combination of regulatory standing, security architecture, and the breadth of capabilities that we provide within a single integrated platform. We're operating in a large and evolving market, and we continue to see encouraging demand across all areas of the business. Importantly, while reported asset values were impacted by lower digital asset prices during the quarter, you know, the normalized assets on platform and normalized state balances continue to grow meaningfully, which we believe will drive upside in our model as the digital asset prices recover. Thank you, everybody.

Speaker 10

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Speaker 9

Wow.

Speaker 15

Goodbye

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