We have Mike Belshe with us, CEO, co-founder of BitGo. Now, the company rang the opening bell here on Wall Street, BTGO. It was one of the loudest bells ever. A lot of enthusiasm for you and your team. We think about BitGo as a leading digital asset infrastructure company. I know you also launched an OTC trading desk. What kind of day was this for you to come public here?
Well, it's an exciting day. I mean, it's a culmination of, I guess, 13 years of work for us. We started all the way back in 2013. So we're one of the earlier companies in the space. We're not necessarily the brand you've heard of first and foremost. We work with institutions. A lot of behind-the-scenes work. So kind of the brand behind the brand, but thousands of institutional clients are on the platform. They might be exchanges, payment processors, broker-dealers, companies you would have heard of. But anyway, we handle all the behind-the-scenes.
We think about there are the folks that are fully on board and those naysayers. You know, it's become evident based on some of the guests we have on how crypto is going to come into our lives in every way, shape, or form. What do you tell the folks that are maybe non-believers at this point? I mean, what you've seen over the last decade, for example.
Yeah. Well, let me give you background on me. So I'm a Silicon Valley technology person. I haven't really been on Wall Street really at all. What happened is, you know, I spent all my career kind of working through the internet era. I was at Netscape before it was a public company, did a number of startups kind of back there. I was never really interested in finance. I did a tour of duty at Microsoft after we sold the company there. I ended up at Google, was one of the first guys on the Chrome browser. What we're seeing right now is there was a disruptive technology, and that disruptive technology was the blockchain. It was Bitcoin. And after you have a disruptive technology, you see tons of experimentation at the product level and tons of experimentation at the business level. And you'll see good ideas, you'll see bad ideas. Back in the 1990s, the same thing happened. The technology disruptor then was the web. And remember, we had like all these crazy companies and people were laughing. They're like, 'Oh, that's never going to work.' And you had pets.com advertising and this other stuff. Guess what? A lot of those didn't work. But whenever you have a technology disruptor, you go through this phase of experimentation. The market sorts it all out. So, we're in that same phase right now. It's not a yaysayer or a naysayer issue. It's we're in that phase. So, there's going to be stuff to laugh at, but coming out of this, remember, we had Amazon, we had Google come out of that wave one. We're going to have another set of companies. We think infrastructure is the place to be. We think this is going to be a long-standing company for a long time to come.
And so, with your company, infrastructure is the place to be. And you provide wallets, validation, trading, custody services. The heightened uncertainty may be on one side of it, but you're seeing strong investor demand and you anticipate more and more going forward, right? Is there any way to quantify what your expectations are?
Look, I used to say that all assets would be digital and people would say, 'Okay, maybe.' And then now Larry Fink says, he's CEO of BlackRock, all assets are going to be digital. So I say, 'Don't ask me, go ask him.' Look, you can think of like Bitcoin, you can think of various other blockchains that exist. We're starting to see a strata of very different use cases and they're all valid. You've got store of value like Bitcoin. You got payment systems, you got stablecoins, you've got tokenized equities, you got tokenized real estate, you've got DeFi. All of these things are getting shaped to and from themselves. And what happened last year in 2025, the regulatory market shifted such that all of a sudden everybody on Wall Street can participate. They were really locked out by their regulators prior to that. So, we think that doubled our TAM last year, just having all of those companies as available clients now. And of course, more or less every day you read something new, New York Stock Exchange says they're going to digitize everything. They're going to need digital partners to do that.
You talked about institutional purchases and, you know, mentioned Larry Fink, right? You've now seen the interest from the big guys. And so that brought some validity to the whole thing. Every day that all of this happens, people believe in it more. You know, also you said that we did see Bitcoin, for example, pull back. We were waiting on some pro-crypto regulation that didn't happen. What kind of regulation are you waiting on in 2026, either near-term or in the back half that you think will make a difference?
Well, let me be clear. You can't run any business waiting on a regulator. So, we aren't waiting on anything. But look, we already have an OCC nationally chartered bank. It's the same standing as all the banks that we have here in New York. Okay? So, it's the highest standing you can have. It's fully compliant, ready to go. It's 100% digital asset. We can do all this stuff there. Second thing, Genius Act was just passed last year, right? That opens the door for stablecoins. The main thing it does is it eliminates the speculation about how the government is going to treat these assets. The next one on the docket is Clarity. I hope that Clarity does pass. I think if it does pass, remember most of the work gets set aside for the CFTC to go figure out later. It does some things now, but mostly you have to wait and see. So, by getting that in place now, all of a sudden, everybody in the industry can start to count on a path forward that the government is going to bless. So, I hope that that happens. If it doesn't happen, you know, things are just you have a little bit more overhang for a while.
