never wanted to build a custody service,” says Mike Belshe, the 55-year-old cofounder and CEO of BitGo, widely regarded as crypto’s first dedicated custodian. “It’s just something we had to do because nobody else had built it.”
When Belshe launched BitGo in 2013, bitcoin had a basic problem: How do you keep it safe? At the time, most wallets depended on a single private key. Lose it and the bitcoin was gone; have it stolen and the thieves could move the funds instantly.
BitGo’s novel security solution was multisig, short for multi-signature, which required more than one key to approve a transaction. That technology helped make crypto usable for institutions by reducing the risk that one compromised employee, laptop or server could drain a wallet.
Given reports of rampant hacking in crypto, BitGo’s small innovation has attracted a tidal wave of business over the last decade as more and more institutions have taken an interest in digital assets. Today, the Palo Alto-based firm helps secure more than $80 billion worth of crypto for some 5,500 clients across dozens of blockchains.
Custody by itself is not a high-fee business—clients with digital assets over $1 million typically pay 20 basis points or two-tenths of a penny for each dollar crypto they store. But those tiny fractions add up. In 2025, BitGo had revenues of $16.2 billion, up nearly 425% from 2024. In January, the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange through a $2.6 billion IPO, becoming the first, and so far only, publicly traded crypto custodian.
Belshe bristles at the label. He prefers to call BitGo “the AWS” or “Switzerland” of digital assets, not just because it sounds grander, but because the old definition of a crypto custodian no longer captures what companies like his are trying to become.
Crypto custody, traditionally about as unglamorous as financial services gets, has been undergoing a massive shift over the past couple of years. The largest custodians have expanded their remit from safeguarding coins into wider institutional franchises, adding trading, staking, derivatives, settlement networks, stablecoin infrastructure and other software for banks and asset managers that want digital-asset exposure without building the machinery themselves.
“Because there’s not a lot of margin complexity in custody, we’ve seen these companies diversify and take advantage of the relationships they have with their custody clients by trying to provide more services around their crypto,” says Chris Brendler, an analyst at institutional broker and investment bank Rosenblatt Securities.
The push to move up the value chain is arriving as crypto’s narrative is finally attempting to shift from speculation to operations. More than $80 billion in spot ETFs, raised in the last two years, have already turned crypto custodians into Wall Street’s vendors. Stablecoins, tokenized securities and AI agents could make them central to the next version of financial plumbing. And despite a prolonged slump in crypto prices, nearly three-quarters of large institutions surveyed by EY and Coinbase earlier this year said they plan to increase their crypto allocations in 2026.
Grand View Research estimates that the global digital-asset custody market was $683 billion in 2024 and projects it will reach $4.4 trillion by 2033. Wide-eyed crypto market forecasts should be taken with a grain of salt, but BitGo’s revenue surge up more than fivefold from $3.1 billion in 2024 suggests demand for crypto infrastructure is growing.
Much of BitGo’s growth comes from heavy trading by existing clients, new customers and an expanded menu of trading pairs. Since BitGo books revenue at full transaction value, the $16 billion overstates the economics of the business. Clearer signs of expansion show up in subscriptions and services revenue, which rose 57% to $121.5 million, and in a new stablecoin-as-a-service business that generated $66.7 million from clients including the Trumps’ World Liberty Financial and SoFi. The service helps fintechs and other institutions issue and manage their own branded stablecoins. In the first quarter of this year, BitGo also added derivatives, where margins and spreads are wider, generating roughly $3 billion in notional trading volume.
Despite its rosy results, BitGo’s stock, at $6.35, is down 65% from its recent IPO price of $18, and the company reported a net loss of $60.7 million in the most recent quarter, which it attributed to “non-cash mark-to-market impacts related to the company’s bitcoin treasury, as well as elevated IPO-related stock-based compensation expense.” Translation: bitcoin’s price nosedive from $90,000 to $65,000 was a gut punch to its asset-based revenue.
Belshe’s pitch to investors is that BitGo can grow past those near-term pressures by turning its custody relationships into a broader trading business. “In terms of where BitGo is going to grow the most in the next phase, I think it is actually going to be trading for both spot and derivatives,” he says. “The institutions are discovering that the model BitGo has is, frankly, just better than what the exchanges in crypto have built so far.”
Instead of going to a single exchange for whatever price is available there, he says, institutional clients are used to a broker model that seeks the best price across venues. BitGo offers trading through a host of different exchanges, including OKX and Deribit (recently acquired by Coinbase), without requiring clients to move assets out of custody.
ustody is almost a misnomer at this point for this category,” says Nathan McCauley, cofounder and CEO of Anchorage Digital, one of the four largest crypto custodians, with $56 billion in digital assets.
McCauley’s San Francisco-based company became the first federally chartered crypto bank in 2021 and now serves more than 1,000 institutional clients. It has doubled revenue every year for the past three years, according to its chief executive, though he declined to disclose specific figures. Anchorage’s fastest-growing businesses are derivatives and stablecoin issuance, whereby the bank mints and manages branded stablecoins on behalf of clients, handling everything from reserve custody to token issuance and redemption under its federal bank charter. The company has partnerships with roughly 20 stablecoin issuers, including Tether, Ethena and Western Union.
In the past year, Anchorage also expanded Atlas, its settlement and collateral-management network, fourfold to nearly 600 institutions and bought its way into adjacent businesses. In 2025, it acquired Mountain Protocol, a stablecoin startup; Hedgey, which manages token allocations, distributions and vesting schedules; and Securitize For Advisors, a wealth management unit of tokenization specialist Securitize. Then, in May, it added agentic banking capabilities, allowing enterprises to fund and control AI agents that operate on their behalf.
McCauley is aggressively growing Anchorage’s product suite because he believes the growing acceptance of crypto will send more traditional banks his way. “Once the CLARITY Act passes, every single bank in the country is going to want to partner with a crypto bank—with us—in order to enable its crypto offerings,” he says. The cost and complexity of getting security right, he adds, will push banks to conclude: “We need to leave this with the trusted party that knows how to do it.”
Whether that regulatory opening arrives soon is uncertain. The bill, which would establish a U.S. framework for digital assets, faces a tight congressional calendar and disputes with major banks over whether stablecoin issuers should be allowed to offer yields on customers’ balances.
Outside the U.S., that shift is already underway. Fireblocks, another leading custody technology and infrastructure provider, says it secures more than $5 trillion in digital-asset transfers annually and serves more than 80 banks. In some cases, it underpins a bank’s entire crypto strategy, as with Bank Frick, the $9.5 billion (assets under management at the end of 2025) Liechtenstein-based institution serving clients and intermediaries across Europe.
Founded in 2018 in Tel Aviv, Fireblocks pioneered multi-party computation, or MPC, a custody standard that splits a private key into multiple pieces distributed across different parties rather than relying on multisig, which requires multiple keys. Like BitGo and Anchorage, Fireblocks has also expanded into additional services, including tokenization and lending.
Coinbase, considered the “blue-chip bank” of crypto, has benefited more than any other crypto company from the industry’s institutionalization. The biggest crypto exchange in the U.S. has approximately $300 billion in digital assets on its platform, including retail assets, or about 13% of all crypto, but it is especially prominent in the institutional segment, which it serves through Coinbase Prime, its brokerage and custody arm.
Coinbase no longer breaks out custodial fee revenue in its earnings reports, but the last available figures show that its custodial fee revenue doubled to $141.7 million out of $6.6 billion in total revenue in 2024, up from $69.5 million in 2023, helped by higher crypto prices and the SEC’s approval of spot crypto ETFs in January 2024. Coinbase has since remained the primary custodian for roughly 80% of those funds, including those issued by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley and WisdomTree.
Considering that established financial giants like Fidelity and BNY also offer custody for major crypto assets, you might expect Wall Street to favor its own. But Coinbase has offered a unique set of advantages by being crypto-native, already trusted inside the industry and, during the Gensler era, one of the few public companies in the sector that institutions could point to with some comfort, says Rosenblatt’s Brendler. Meanwhile, Fidelity may have been viewed as a competing ETF issuer rather than a preferred custodian, he adds.
“That’s not a coincidence. We view that as a verdict,” says Rick Schonberg, head of Coinbase Prime. “We have 250 security engineers alone,” he notes, “larger than many of our would-be competitors entirely.”
Schonberg is careful not to lean too heavily on assets under custody (AUC), the industry’s favorite headline metric. AUC drives revenue, but in crypto it rises and falls with token prices, making it a noisy measure of business momentum. He says the better indicators are net inflows, customer breadth and whether clients are using more of the platform. And on those measures Coinbase has fared well, with 12 consecutive quarters of positive custody inflows, according to Schonberg.
His next target is registered investment advisors, a large and still underpenetrated channel for crypto. “We’ve been investing in a product we call Prime Custody, which is really tailored to that space,” says Schonberg. “What Prime Custody enables that is helpful to these clients is to do all your activities within the qualified custodian: trading, storage, staking. With that unlock, we’re hoping to bring in incremental RIA business, as well as hedge funds that are themselves registered as RIAs.”
he rapid expansion of leading custodians has made the market more difficult for everyone else, causing smaller firms like Andreessen Horowitz-backed Entropy and Prime Trust to pivot, seek buyers or wind down altogether.
That, along with the onslaught of traditional banks, in addition to Fidelity and BNY, has created an intensely competitive environment. Citi has said it plans to launch a crypto custody service later this year, and Morgan Stanley recently applied for a de novo national trust bank charter that would allow it to custody crypto.
Meanwhile, London-based custodian Copper, which was considering an IPO shortly after BitGo’s listing, is now seeking a buyer at a valuation of about $500 million, according to CoinDesk. Copper had already pulled back from pure custody in 2023, shutting that business to focus on ClearLoop, its settlement network that lets clients trade while keeping assets in custody rather than sending them directly to exchanges.
In May, London-based Zodia Custody, a majority-owned subsidiary of $443 billion (assets) Standard Chartered, agreed to have its custody business fully acquired by the bank. “More and more banks want to hold digital assets—stablecoins, tokens, crypto—and they need banking-grade software to do it," says Zodia’s CEO, Julian Sawyer.
“Nobody needs convincing at this point. Everybody wants to move to digital rails,” echoes Belshe. But he worries whether crypto’s new institutional plumbing will deliver on the industry’s original promise or merely reproduce Wall Street’s old tollbooths on faster rails.
“There’s plenty to be made when we move all the assets onto the new rail system,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be 150 basis points. We can fix the system, keep the rates low, and yet also get all this stuff into digital. If we just end up with the same old system after all this work, that’d be a real shame.”