Welcome everybody to the BitGo Vault. Mike Belshe, CEO and founder of BitGo. With me here is Pete Janney, just the most recent part of the team that has joined Team BitGo. We're happy to announce this last week that BitGo and Nidig have merged together, bringing all of the strengths of BitGo's infrastructure platform with all of the strengths of Nidig's institutional, sophisticated investor, prime brokerage type services. Pete leads that team. Really excited to have you with us. Welcome aboard.
Thank you very much. It was my son's first day of school on Friday, my first day at the new job on Friday. We're thrilled, and there's a lot of excited teammates as well, just to get settled and up and running on the BitGo platform. So we're excited.
We're thrilled too. I mean, you know, look, Nidig has been an amazing firm. When did it start?
Yeah, maybe I can start to give you a little background on Nidig. In 2017, Nidig was founded as a custodian for digital assets.
Yeah, at that time, as you know, supporting institutional digital asset holders for Bitcoin and a number of other coins. And from there, on top of the regulated custodian, we built execution services for spot trading, for derivatives financing, and sort of evolved over that time, really from 2018 to just recently, to offer some of the most sophisticated institutional-grade solutions for Bitcoin holders in the market, across that product set that I just mentioned.
Yeah, look, I mean, obviously we've watched Nidig as a competitor in the space, obviously had a Bitcoin focus, which is fantastic. I think the owners early on felt pretty strongly about Bitcoin.
And then it's exciting to be here today where the two companies are coming together, but then you've also built out an amazing team. Tell me about your background and where your team comes from.
Yeah, absolutely. So, yes, the people are a large, if not the largest, part of this transaction. We are very, very proud of the people at Nidig and what we've built over the years. So we're really excited to join and integrate the teams. But personally, I started in the year 2000 after graduating university in Philadelphia, went to Chicago and was trading options on the Chicago exchange. And so...
Did you use hand signals?
I did. We had, and they called it ARB back then. So [laughter] I was in the CBOE trading, you know, equities products, exactly, and the S&P index, so options on those things. That's really how I grew up. But shortly after, moved back to New York and traded options on the sales and trading desks for investment banks. 15 of those years I spent at Credit Suisse in New York, running equity derivatives businesses for Credit. So, you know, derivatives, options, volatility sort of runs through my DNA. That was part of the industrial logic to sort of build the franchise at Nidig. You know, it was a very opaque space with digital assets. We had institutional investors that wanted an experience that really resembled what they had and what they were familiar with in traditional markets. And so we set out to build that at Nidig. And then, you know, humbly, I think we did it very, very successfully. Along with that, we built an incredible team as part of this transaction. We've got 29 amazing individuals that are coming over across all of the different functions, not only trading, sales coverage, but some of the other critical components like operations and finance, etc. So we're really, really grateful that we found a home and you guys were such a great fit.
Well, we're grateful that you're here. I mean, I think it's clear you hit the upper echelon of clients, you hit those sophisticated clients that need to know that they're working with people that have done this before, not just in the crypto context but before that as well. So hopefully this all makes sense. What do you look forward to most next?
Yeah. So I think, I mean, something that you alluded to, the client demand is still there, and obviously crypto has evolved over the cycles. And I think arguably we're coming out of a cycle now, right? We've been in a downtrend in sort of price terms for a long time, but the adoption really hasn't abated, right? And so beneath the surface and behind the scenes, that adoption has really, really accelerated. And I think Nidig had a huge appetite to support that demand, but I think what we can actually do that much, much better on the BitGo platform, given BitGo's history, you guys have been around since 2013, I think, and just built such a quality, trusted brand. And that's why it seems to be such a perfect marriage. That was what we set out to give our clients. So from a custody, security, blockchain infrastructure perspective, combined with some of the solutions on the more sophisticated products and deliverables that Nidig offers, it seems to be just such a great... So I'm excited about what we can offer in BitGo's universe, that is greatly expanded, and the resourcing that is available. BitGo is going to be much, much better for our clients.
I think generally speaking, yeah, look, we couldn't be more thrilled this is all coming together. I think the industry is growing. It needs sophisticated players and it needs grown-up institutions that are taking time to get all the audits right, all the wallets right. And we got the OCC national bank charter behind us. We support a lot more coins, right? So, you know, clients that are interested in hitting other things, next step, tokenized equities are coming in 2026. Obviously, all of your clients participate in equities, probably in the non-tokenized form. So look forward to bringing those to market end of this year, coming into next year.
Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, at Nidig, we only supported Bitcoin, as you said, and so our purview was very limited, and that's a philosophical alignment, and we are certainly very aligned with the properties of Bitcoin and the philosophical nature. But in a larger pool, we can offer those products to more people, more underlyings, more tokens, more assets. These investors, these asset holders, have use cases. They need financing, they need yield solutions, they need leverage. All of those things we can provide, and now in a much wider cast, a much wider net, and deliver those to the clients on the BitGo platform, in addition to offering the Nidig clients that are coming over much more exposure as far as a single platform for tokens and other financial products.
One of the things I've been impressed with, I mean, obviously we did this transaction together. Really happy to have you coming aboard, but also we got technical talent coming on. We got some of the software that's coming over. Of course, we have other functions that are coming in as well. But what do you see as the biggest inhibitor to growth for our space over the next couple of years?
