BitGo buys institutional trading division from NYDIG

Digital asset firm BitGo Holdings has acquired power and high-performance computing provider NYDIG's institutional trading business.

The purchase, announced on Friday, expands BitGo's institutional offerings within a year of it being approved for a national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last winter. According to an SEC filing, the deal initially closed for around $42.5 million, with $7 million in cash and $35.5 million in BitGo stocks.

"This is what a maturing crypto industry looks like," Srikant Yennamandra, global head of digital assets for Accenture, told American Banker. "Some firms are betting on the economics of infrastructure, power and compute, while others [like BitGo] are focused on owning the institutional relationship by building integrated platforms that mirror the services institutional investors expect from traditional finance. They're two different views of where long-term value will sit, and we could continue to see consolidation as firms vertically integrate to strengthen their position."

BitGo's acquisition is expected to expand its institutional markets platform, according to a company statement, by enhancing its existing trading offerings. As part of the transaction, approximately 30 NYDIG employees joined BitGo, along with NYDIG's existing institutional client trading relationships. The deal also includes promises for up to $15 million in cash upon achieving unnamed revenue milestones and $5 million each of cash and stock retention awards for transferred employees upon hitting revenue milestones, according to the SEC filing.

"Institutions increasingly want to work with a trusted partner that can support the full lifecycle of digital assets, from custody and trading to financing and settlement," said BitGo co-founder and CEO Mike Belshe.

Stephen Aschettino, partner at Fox Rothschild and chair of the firm's fintech and digital assets division, told American Banker that the deal was "not a retreat" for NYDIG, which was impacted by the crypto industry taking a hit several years ago.

"[It] is a disciplined capital-allocation decision," he said. "The company retains its Bitcoin mining operations and a power-generation and high-performance-computing pipeline. Divesting the trading arm lets NYDIG concentrate management attention and balance-sheet resources on that infrastructure build-out, without the operational complexity of running a client-facing institutional markets business in parallel."

The deal also signals something broader, according to Aschettino: The institutional digital-asset market is maturing to the point where regulatory credentials are a competitive advantage. 

"We should expect continued consolidation along these lines as the OCC charter framework takes hold," he said, "and the market rewards platforms that can offer institutional clients a cohesive, federally supervised suite of services."

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BitGo's acquisition of NYDIG's institutional trading business is "a textbook example" of a digital asset infrastructure provider using its regulatory moat (a business advantage created by government licensing) to build out a full-service institutional platform, Aschettino said.

"Since receiving conditional approval from the OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] last December to convert to a federally chartered national trust bank, BitGo has been positioning itself as the kind of single-counterparty solution that large allocators and financial institutions increasingly demand," he said. "Adding NYDIG's derivatives, structured-products, and financing capabilities, along with roughly thirty professionals and a meaningful book of institutional client relationships, fills the most conspicuous gap in that offering."

BitGo was one of five digital asset firms to receive conditional approval for a national trust bank charter from the OCC on Dec. 12, 2025. The license allows the firms to conduct non-fiduciary activities under interpretive letter 1176, authored in 2021 by now-Comptroller of the Currency Gould, who was serving as the agency's general counsel at the time. That letter permitted trust banks to engage in "activities that are non-fiduciary in nature, such as non-fiduciary custody." 

The agency's decision letter for BitGo gave the company conditional approval to convert its trust from a state-chartered trust company in South Dakota to a national trust bank company. In its conversion application, according to the filing, BitGo Trust Bank would use its national trust charter to offer custody services for digital assets and fiat currency, stablecoin issuance and other related services such as settlement and transfer.

According to the OCC's Corporate Applications Search database, BitGo's national trust charter application was marked as both "Approved" and "Consummate/Effective" on Dec. 12. The company announced the following day that it "received full, unconditional approval" from the OCC to convert its trust charter and now advertises its national trust bank as operational. "BitGo now functions under the same supervisory framework that governs traditional banking institutions," a company statement said at the time.

The OCC and BitGo did not immediately respond to requests for clarification on the status of BitGo's national trust charter.