CEO & Founder, Galaxy Digital
Billionaire Novogratz on Coinbase, Dogecoin, Hiring
Apr.16 -- Galaxy Digital founder and CEO Mike Novogratz discusses cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase's initial public offering, the recent rise in the price of smaller digital tokens, and his firm's appointment of former Goldman Sachs executive Michael Daffey as chairman. He speaks on "Bloomberg Markets."
About Mike Novogratz
In late April and May 2026, Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, commented on market conditions, Bitcoin, and his company's performance. He described the current stock market as being in a "bubble" and "euphoric," driven by AI mania and anticipated mega-IPOs from companies like SpaceX and OpenAI. Novogratz stated that "great markets, great bubbles end with something symbolic" and suggested that the IPOs of such companies could serve as that symbol. He advised that investors "keep dancing when the music's playing" but be prepared to exit quickly, recommending the purchase of put options rather than shorting stocks. Regarding the Federal Reserve, he predicted that Fed Chair Kevin Warsh would be cutting rates by the end of 2026, which he said could provide "the last juice that this market needs." On Bitcoin and MicroStrategy, Novogratz said the "major reason Bitcoin rallied so impressively" was Michael Saylor's strategy of selling stock to buy more Bitcoin, but he expressed doubt that Saylor could "reignite that flywheel." He noted that MicroStrategy now trades more like an ETF and that if Bitcoin fell significantly, it "is not going to be a very good stock to own." Asked about a U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve, Novogratz said the government would "categorically" not use taxpayer dollars to buy Bitcoin, though he gave 50/50 odds that it might do "something symbolically," such as placing seized Bitcoin into a reserve. During Galaxy Digital's Q1 2026 earnings call, Novogratz reported that the company's trading volumes remained flat despite a 20% drop in crypto prices, which he called "the first time we've really started to see a decoupling of our business from the price." He described the broader industry as transitioning toward infrastructure for tokenized assets and said Galaxy is becoming "less cyclical to crypto" due to its data center business.
Transcript (22 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
I
Interviewer0:00
Coinbase at 332, right that's below where it was trading in private markets. Help us out, what do you think it should be worth?
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Mike Novogratz0:08
Listen, it's tough to put a number on something, but I would tell you one thing. Coinbase is the first big institutional equity name in the crypto space. It will be part of everyone's portfolio because everyone now thinks if I'm not long crypto, I'm short it, and they need an allocation in equity portfolios. So what's happening is a lot of the original investors and employees who had made lots of money on Coinbase and had their entire net worth tied up are selling, as they always do, and there's a turnover. It's being bought by institutions. That'll take a couple weeks before we have the whole thing turned over and hit an equilibrium. My gut feeling is at that point, the stock will start climbing higher again. Is it expensive? On a P/E basis, on a price-to-growth basis, you tell me. But I will tell you one thing: if you think it's expensive, it's going to stay expensive because crypto is just starting.
I
Interviewer1:08
How does this, you know, more than 65 billion dollars in valuation, make you think about your own plans to list in the U.S.?
M
Mike Novogratz1:15
Listen, unfortunately we're under strict guidelines that we're not allowed to talk about that. I can talk a lot about our company. We are bursting at the seams, hitting on all cylinders right now. Our trading business is up, our direct investment business is up. We've hired 75 people in six months, we'll probably hire another 40 in the next four months. The quality of people coming into the crypto space is amazing, young talent that is looking at tech and investment banking and saying I want to move to crypto. This is not a fintech business. Coinbase doesn't have a fintech business, nor do we. We have crypto ecosystem businesses. It's hard to even know where the borders are. When they say what's the total addressable market, well four months ago no one was thinking NFTs was going to explode like it did. Using the blockchain to transfer value, whether it's a digital gold in Bitcoin or smart contracts with financial services in DeFi, or now IPR collectibles in NFTs, is just an exploding sector.
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Interviewer2:21
You brought in Michael Daffy from Goldman Sachs as chairman. What do you want him to do for Galaxy Digital?
M
Mike Novogratz2:29
Listen, I wanted to send a really strong message to our investors, our employees, our stock market investors, and our customers that we are a customer-focused merchant bank for the 21st century. Michael Daffy probably was the number one client guy on Wall Street over the last 20 years. His relationships with the biggest hedge fund managers, with the biggest real money managers, institutional investors are the best I think in the entire street. He was chairman of global markets at Goldman Sachs. But really, I brought him because he understands how to deal with customers and knows all the customers. We're trying to migrate customers from traditional finance into this new world of crypto, blockchain, Bitcoin. They often go on the same path: they start with Bitcoin, then they start learning a little more, they say well what is this Ethereum about? That path is accelerating for so many of them. We want to be that bridge, and I think Daffy is perfectly suited to help guide us there.
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Interviewer3:29
Like even sophisticated investors find it hard to wrap their heads around this area of digital finance. Who do you compete with that may make it easier to view the universe? Are you competing with a Coinbase or are you competing with a Goldman Sachs?
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Mike Novogratz3:46
Listen, right now we're not competing with Goldman Sachs or any of the big banks. We're actually collaborating with them. We did a partnership with Morgan Stanley, we hope to do partnerships with most of the banks. I think in three or four years we'll be competing with them. So my message to my employees is we gotta stay the smartest guys in the room, we gotta keep learning, we gotta keep innovating, because they're coming. I tell you, we're also starting to compete with the centralized finance, with on-chain solutions to lots of these problems. In some ways, 15-20 years from now, all banks like ours might be anachronisms. I say we're a bridge to the new era. The new era might be a much more peer-to-peer era. Things don't happen overnight, so our idea is to continue to innovate and try to stay one step ahead.
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Interviewer4:38
You know better than anyone, because you were an early mover in this space, that the proof of concept and the valuation are not the same thing. So let's focus on the valuation. You mentioned NFTs, I think that's an excellent place to focus because while the blockchain part of that has great value and as you say may replace every intermediary in future, it doesn't mean that the trading value of the current NFTs makes any sense at all. As you go to launch a Galaxy ETF, do you worry about valuations?
M
Mike Novogratz5:07
Well listen, I think Bitcoin has had its cycle. We had a crash in 2017 and now we're in a massive adoption cycle. So I think Bitcoin is going higher. I think the same thing with Ethereum. Ethereum went from 1300 to like 80, it's now come all the way back to 2300-2400. The gas fees you need to spend to use it are going lower and lower, so use case is going higher and higher. All NFTs, or the bulk of NFTs, are being built on Ethereum. The bulk of central bank issued digital currencies or stablecoins are going on Ethereum. A lot of the DeFi projects are being built on Ethereum. So Ethereum is going to get valued like a network. The more people that use that network, the higher the price is going to go. In the NFT space, we had some crazy prices. I don't think someone else is going to pay 69 million dollars for a Beeple. That money is coming from this crypto economy. It wasn't a classic art buyer who bid 69 million, it was two really wealthy crypto people. But you have to understand, now there's over two trillion dollars of wealth in crypto that didn't exist 10 years ago, didn't exist really three years ago. So that's real money. There are new consumers that are spending things that matter to them. We're going to see these two economies merge. We're about a half a percent of global wealth in crypto. I think what I just said, one half of one percent of global wealth in crypto, that's going to be two, three, four percent in the next few years. So this economy is only going to grow.
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Interviewer6:43
As it gets there, though, the growing pains you've referenced, the potential for washouts. As you put together for instance an ETF, how might some of those valuation corrections hit the retail market and that retail investor?
M
Mike Novogratz6:57
So I think listen, Bitcoin, Ethereum, they're both 80% of all instruments. 80% of that is a lot of volatility. I think over the next few years volatility will go lower and lower. But right now that's four times stock markets when stock markets are volatile, it's eight times currency markets. So people's allocation should be made with that in mind. We expect volatility. The really kind of frothiness that we're seeing right now isn't in Ethereum, is it in Bitcoin, is it in Coinbase? It's in smaller altcoins, smaller tokenized communities. Dogecoin today rallied up to a 50 billion dollar market cap. It's reminiscent of the GameStop thing. It is a meme coin. There's lots of young people on the Reddit chat rooms that love Doge. Both Elon Musk and Mark Cuban are pumping it up. It doesn't really have a purpose. It's got a community and maybe they can keep value there. I would be very, very worried if one of my friends was investing in Dogecoin at these prices. So I do think there's some pockets of retail froth in speculation. XRP, which is under investigation, the parent company under investigation by the SEC, their coin went from 40 cents to a dollar sixty in a month. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me either. So there is a retail frenzy. It's not really being seen in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Quite the opposite, money's coming out of Bitcoin and Ethereum and moving into these other coins for more juice, for more excitement.
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Interviewer8:38
Michael, we're seeing Canada has been ahead of the U.S. in terms of regulatory allowances. There is an ETF that allows investors now to essentially short Bitcoin. Is that going to bring, as we get more products like that, more calm or less volatility do you think to price movements?
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Mike Novogratz9:00
You know, I think it should bring less volatility. I say that because the more liquidity, the more people have easy access to make the bet they want to bet, you get price stability, you get price discovery. Previously to short Bitcoin, you'd have to go out and find a borrow and sell it. If you're a trader, not hard to do, but if you're a retail investor, almost impossible to do. So this is giving the other side of the market a chance to express their view. So hats off to the group that came up with that product. I wish our guys had thought of it first. The more liquidity in the system, the better.
I
Interviewer9:43
Mike, you know this is not the first hire by the way with Michael Daffy that you've made from Goldman Sachs. You know a little bit earlier this year was Damian Vanderwelt as well. You know a little secret, a couple years ago I used to find a lot of my banking sources in the crypto community because there are people who are working in the banks looking to leave. Do you think that there's something about talent that the banks are not getting that's attracting people away from them into firms like yours?
M
Mike Novogratz10:11
Yeah, listen, this is a frontier industry. So when you dream, you can dream big. What was interesting, forget the senior guys. I've known Michael Daffy for 30 years. He had a wonderful career at Goldman Sachs and he was ready to lead to the next chapter. What's more interesting to me is we're hiring 24, 25, 26 year olds from those same firms, from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, who are at the perfect part of their career. For those banks, they've gone to the right schools, they've been trained well. It's almost more painful for those banks to lose those guys than their senior people. Senior people always rotate out at one point, but it's the junior people that are the lifeblood of those banks. Those junior people are starting to say, hey, this is a cooler career, it's got more upside potential, certainly more risk, but it's got a lot more upside potential. So we're seeing a migration of great talent.
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Interviewer11:08
You know, one of the things that makes this space so interesting, Mike, and as you say there's a lot of maturation ahead and in it some opportunity and potentially some risk, is the role the regulators will play. Do you think that generally speaking the regulators, I'm going to include central banks and what they're thinking about their own version of a digital coin or cryptocurrency, will they be a partner in this or will they actually be something you've got to figure out how to get around and over?
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Mike Novogratz11:33
I think listen, there's two sides to that coin. Gary Gensler, when he was teaching at MIT, gave a really interesting talk on regulation. He said a lot of innovation happens by small guys that the regulators let kind of get away with things. You're seeing a ton of that in crypto. But the big guys got to play by the rules and work with the regulators. Fortunately or unfortunately, we're a big guy, so we've always played by the rules and we're working with the regulators. I think Gary will be great as an SEC commissioner. I think he is smart, he wants to be perceived as smart and articulate, so he's not going to not answer things. I think he'll lay out rules. He's already said Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities. That's a great start. The big questions in crypto are really two. One is around decentralized finance. When I'm trading with someone in a smart contract, do I need to know who's on the other side of that? We take the approach right now that unless you can have some way of high probability knowing you're not dealing with a bad actor, we need to KYC that person. That's going to get solved, and I think the regulators are going to put some bumpers or railguards around that. The second really is the same theme: Bitcoin, know your customer on unhosted wallets versus hosted wallets, how we think about peer-to-peer transfer in general. So that's really the big regulatory issue. I guess the third would be how we think about securities offerings versus non-securities offerings. A lot of these token economies were launched in 2017, 2018, and you can go back with Ripple XRP and say hey, that looked like a securities offering. So now they're in trouble. There are a lot of other tokens out there that are probably sweating a little bit, and I think it'll help when we get a little more clarity around that.
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Interviewer13:42
Mike, the Biden administration, China's rolling out a digital yuan, and the Biden administration views that as a threat to the dollar. However, our Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mike McGlone says Bitcoin actually enhances dollar dominance, and he talked to me this morning about the fact that Tether is a digital dollar with volume that's double Bitcoin. How do you view governments and their foray into digital currencies?
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Mike Novogratz14:06
I think it is a real threat to the dollar dominance that we don't have a bigger U.S.-backed stablecoin. We're going to see Facebook's announce, hopefully in the next quarter or so, their Diem coin, which is basically just a dollar wrapped in a coin. Circle and Coinbase have a coin called USDC, which is a stablecoin growing like a weed. Central bank issued digital currencies sanctioned by the central bank are a major part of what we're going to see develop in the next few years. It's one of the reasons a lot of those are built on the Ethereum network, why Ethereum continues to go higher. But if you let China dominate global payment platforms, the dominance of the dollar is going to weaken, period. Treasury knows that now, politicians in the U.S. know that now. So we're not turning back on that. Figuring out how to do it where you protect the privacy of your citizens versus what China's doing, there's a lot of art in there. I think the U.S. is being really thoughtful on how it's approaching it. Most likely, you're gonna allow private companies to run these things, but having the assets held at a Federal Reserve-sanctioned bank makes the most sense to me. So there's a lot of nuance. I've been on the phone with heads of central banks for four or five different countries in the last two months as they're all trying to figure out their version of what we call the central bank issued digital currency.
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Interviewer15:44
Have you talked with Treasury about helping them figure that out?
M
Mike Novogratz15:47
You know, I haven't specifically, but our guys are in dialogue with some of the people on the lower tiers of Treasury. When you have these turnovers in administrations, it takes a while for the new leaders. I mean, Gary Gensler literally just got put in front of his desk yesterday. It takes a while for the senior people to kind of get their hands around everything. But there's a lot of people in the working ranks of Treasury, SEC, OCC that know a whole lot about the crypto economy, about blockchain, and about all these issues.