Jody Mettler (BitGo): “Custody is a loss leader: you need it to participate in everything else, but the margins alone don't sustain a standalone business.”

BitGo started as a multi-sig wallet pioneer. When did you realize that custody on its own wasn't enough as a standalone product?

There wasn't a specific moment. It was an evolution. Mike Belshe built the company from the ground up as a wallet infrastructure play, then added the custodial layer once it became obvious that a wallet holding $200 or $400 million with the keys in your pocket wasn't a workable model at scale. What changed after 2020 is that institutional clients stopped wanting to just buy and hold. They wanted to put the assets to work: generate yield, use them as collateral, trade against them without moving them off-platform. So we started layering staking, trading, and settlement rails on top of custody. Custody is still the foundation, but the stack keeps expanding.

You just converted from a South Dakota trust company to a nationally chartered trust bank under the OCC. What does that structure actually unlock that a standard crypto custodian can't do?

We originally set up in South Dakota because it's one of the few US jurisdictions where custody is treated as a fiduciary activity under a trust charter. It's the Switzerland of US trust law. That gave us grandfathered fiduciary status when we moved up to the OCC, which matters because at the national level custody isn't automatically a fiduciary activity. The trust bank charter widens the perimeter significantly: we can now trade directly through the bank, which we weren't licensed to do under the South Dakota trust. The regulatory footprint is genuinely national, and the product surface follows.

Your institutional client base is shifting from crypto-native firms to traditional financial institutions. What's driving that?

We've always been institutionally focused, with around 5,700 institutional clients today, but historically that meant crypto-native firms, asset managers, trading shops. What's changing is that with MiCA in Europe and the GENIUS Act now in the US and the CLARITY Act advancing through the Senate, the traditional players who had been sitting on the sidelines are finally moving. Their compliance stacks haven't fully caught up. The technology moved faster than most institutions expected, and the internal machinery is still catching up. But the on-ramp is now open in a way it wasn't 18 months ago.

"We don't have the friction most incumbents do. Our team came from both sides"

Compliance is famously the bottleneck in this industry. How do you maintain product velocity?

Mike hired deliberately, five or six years ago, for people who had both traditional finance and crypto-native backgrounds, a combination that barely existed at the time. Our compliance team came out of the banks. I came out of a bank. We're commercially focused, but we understand the regulatory perimeter, so we don't have the internal drag most incumbents do. And structurally, we're flat: Mike can tap our CCO on the shoulder and move something forward in a day. That's not possible at Citi. I know. I spent 22 years there in payments.

Zodia was acquired by Standard Chartered. Is the crypto-native custody market essentially dead?

No, but it's consolidating. Custody is a loss leader: you need it to participate in everything else, but the margins alone don't sustain a standalone business. Companies like us that build a full financial stack on top of custody are essential to that ecosystem. Over the next two to three years, you'll see more M&A. There are too many custodians chasing too few clients, and that natural merging is coming.

And where does BitGo sit in that consolidation? Buyer or seller?

Our IPO prospectus is explicit that a portion of the proceeds is earmarked for M&A. So structurally, we're set up to be an acquirer. We want to grow the business by bringing in products and capabilities we're not going to build ourselves, and the balance sheet post-IPO gives us the means to do that.

"Payments is going to be the interesting space. Custody won't reprice, payments will"

Mastercard bought BVNK for $1.8 billion. Bridge went to Stripe for $1.1 billion. Custody infrastructure trades at a fraction of that. Why the gap?

Historically in traditional financial rails, custody has always been the loss leader, the price of entry that lets you monetise elsewhere. The market is telling you the same thing in digital assets. Payments is different: stablecoins have proven you can move money on the blockchain, and the TAM is enormous. I don't begrudge any payments company for being valued at a multiple of a custody company. The addressable market is genuinely bigger. And you'll see consolidation on the payments side too, eventually. It's just earlier in the cycle.

You're now offering trading, staking, lending, and borrowing on top of custody. At what point does concentrating that stack become a single point of failure for your clients?

Our clients make their own risk-based decisions. Many diversify across custodians, and that's prudent. The structural protection in our favour is that we don't hold client assets on our balance sheet and we don't rehypothecate. Assets sit in segregated fiduciary accounts, so if BitGo went bankrupt, those assets are not part of the bankruptcy estate. They revert to the client. On top of that, we carry up to $250 million Lloyd's of London specie policy: physical property insurance on the offline keys. It's a very hard bar to clear, which is why most custodians don't have it. Not all custody architecture is even set up to be insurable that way.

"I don't consider Fireblocks or Ledger direct competitors. We're structurally different"

How do you position against Fireblocks, Ledger Enterprise, and the other players people bracket you with?

Honestly, I don't view them as direct competitors. Our edge is the security architecture. To my knowledge, we're one of the few custodians running a fully vaulted, fully offline custody operating at institutional scale. Our keys never touch the internet. That's a structurally different model from what everyone else is doing, and it's precisely why the specie insurance works. I'm very confident about our positioning.

"First cash, then liquid instruments. Buildings come last"

Three years out, what's the product roadmap?

Everyone in the industry will give you the same answer: tokenization. Stablecoins proved you can move money on the blockchain. That was step one. Step two is already underway with money market funds and other liquid instruments. Step three, over the next couple of years, is real-world assets that are structurally illiquid: real estate, physical assets. There's a lot of marketing noise around that today, and a lot of what's announced isn't yet real. But you have to plan for it now, because separately, I think blockchain will become the new supply chain infrastructure. That's where real-world assets really start to move on-chain in volume. The firms that aren't planning for that today will be the ones saying "we didn't think it would move that fast" in two years, which is exactly the mistake traditional finance already made once.

And the hardest product decision you've had to make at BitGo?

The shift we're working through right now: from purely institutional to also serving retail. It's a completely different animal. But the thesis is straightforward. We want retail users to get the same protections institutions already get. If you're at an exchange and you’re not in a qualified custody product, your assets sit in an omnibus account that could be part of the estate in a bankruptcy scenario. It's a much more mature model than FTX, obviously, but the structural risk is still there. We were one of the distribution agents for the FTX estate, so we know what recovery looks like when custody is set up correctly versus when it isn't. Institutional clients of BitGo would get their assets back in days, not thirteen years. That's the standard we want to bring to retail.