BitGo CEO Mike Belshe: The latest bitcoin downturn doesn't bother me too much

Well, these things don't bother me too much. You know, BitGo's been around since 2013. This is like our fifth crypto crash, so to speak. Every time there's a real downturn like this, there's a lot of people out there saying negative things. But over the long haul, it always kind of comes back. If you believe and understand the thesis of what's behind Bitcoin, I think you got to believe that this is actually a good thing. There's a lot of deleveraging that's happening, so then the market can continue to grow.

Well, look, AI can't touch cash. So, I'm pretty sure that AI is going to be using some form of digital asset, cryptocurrency. Stable coins have emerged as a great way to do payments. They're one to one backed. They're easily understood. They run 365 days a year. So, when you think about how AI is going to interface with us when it comes to money, of course, it's going to be digital. At BitGo, we're building infrastructure to make it easier for robots to use wallets, have wallets, and have those of course controlled by the folks that are behind those AI bots as well. So this is just emerging now and it's going to grow.

Well, it certainly could be. So, we've been talking about use cases for years. Sometimes people say the use cases aren't here. But remember, when it comes to money, it always takes a really long time for things to evolve. So, use cases that we do have, of course, we got store value, that's Bitcoin, we've got stable coins, and that's payments just getting started really in the last year, year and a half. Now, the tokenization of real world assets, this is growing like crazy. Just today I think we have Binance and Franklin Templeton with an announcement. We got BlackRock announcing that they plan to tokenize their shares. These things are coming actually pretty quickly in 2026. Lastly, DeFi also saw some announcements today with Uniswap and DeFi being accessed directly from traditional financial players. So with the regulatory landscape having changed so much in just the last year, finally everybody feels they can participate in a way that they know that their regulator is going to work with them instead of trying to fight them or tear it down. Innovation is good for the economy. It's good for consumers. It's good for everybody.

That's right. Look, we're an OCC chartered reserve bank, national bank. It's the same as the status of many of the traditional players that you've been using for literally centuries now. We're doing this because our job is to make sure that people have the utmost trust and confidence with us. It's also part of why we've just become a public company. So, you can examine everything about the company. You can see our financials. They're coming out at regular periods. This is all about making sure that we've enabled the largest financial institutions in the world, not just the US, but to be able to use the infrastructure of digital assets.