BitGo Holdings (NYSE:BTGO) released second-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Wednesday. Read the complete transcript below.
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The full earnings call is available at https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/974937511
Summary
BitGo Holdings Inc reported a 113% year-over-year increase in total revenue to $3.8 billion, though sequentially it fell by 39% due to a shift in trading from spot to derivatives, impacting revenue reporting.
The company launched several strategic initiatives, including derivatives trading, which saw $3 billion in notional volume in Q1, and expanded partnerships with firms like 21Shares and OKEx to enhance institutional settlement infrastructure.
Future guidance suggests that digital asset sales revenue is expected to remain stable in Q2, with anticipated growth in stablecoin services and a continued focus on strategic growth areas like tokenized equities and stablecoin infrastructure.
Despite market headwinds, the company increased its client base by 42% year-over-year to 5,569 and reported a 29% year-over-year growth in normalized assets on platform.
Management emphasized that periods of market volatility are opportunities to strengthen the business, focusing on product development, regulatory capabilities, and expanding client engagement.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to BitGo first quarter 2026 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will have a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the call over to Rachel Dye, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Rachel Dye (Head of Investor Relations)
Hello everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining BitGo's Q1 2026 earnings conference call. Our remarks today will include forward looking statements including those regarding our future operating results and financial condition, such as our business strategy, market growth and objectives for future operations. Actual results may vary materially from today's statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause these results to differ are included in our SEC filings, including those that are stated in the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 and in our other filings with the SEC. These forward looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward looking statements. Additionally, the matters we discussed today will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of any non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are set forth in our earnings press release. Non GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for GAAP measures. Joining me today on the call are Mike Belshee, Founder and CEO, as well as Ed Reginelli, CFO. With that, I will now turn the call over to Mike.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Thank you Rachel and thank you everyone for joining us. We delivered strong underlying business performance in Q1 despite continued softness across the broader digital asset market. While market activity created pressure on our headline financial results, underlying monetization across the businesses remained strong and we continued to gain market share across assets under custody, trading volume and several of our product verticals during the quarter. We also continue to invest across product platform and go-to-market capabilities while making meaningful progress across several strategic growth areas that we believe will matter over the long term. Before I go deeper into the quarter, I want to address an important point regarding the accounting presentation of our results as we expect this will be an area of investor focus. Bitgo today operates multiple businesses across trading, staking, financing, stablecoin, infrastructure, settlement and other related services under GAAP. Different parts of the platform are recognized differently for accounting purposes, with certain activities reflected on a gross basis and others reflected on a net basis. As the business continues to Scale and diversify. Reported revenue alone does not always capture the underlying economics or monetization profile of the platform. At the start of January, we launched derivatives within our digital asset sales. Business adoption has been encouraging with approximately 3 billion in notional derivatives trading volume in Q1 alone. As a result, a portion of our client activity shifted from spot trading to derivatives products. That mix shift matters when evaluating our reported revenue because spot trading activity is reflected on a gross basis while the derivatives are reported on a net basis. As a result, the sequential decline in total revenue does not fully reflect the underlying platform economics and reported revenue. Comparisons to prior periods are not directly comparable. More broadly, we believe investors should evaluate the business through the underlying margins, take rates and net economics after direct transaction related costs associated with each of our core revenue streams. We are building institutional grade digital asset infrastructure, the secure regulated control layer that institutions rely on to build within digital assets. Our clients increasingly want integrated workflows across regulated custody, trading, financing, settlement, stablecoin infrastructure and related services through a single trusted partner. We continue to strengthen that foundation throughout Q1 and we believe its importance will only increase as the market matures. We view custody as the entry point to the broader Bitgo platform and the foundation of our client relationships. Clients establish trust, bring assets onto the platform and increasingly expand into our other products and services with a single integrated framework. This land-and-expand strategy is central to how we deepen client engagement. It's how we increase workflows across the platform and drive long term platform value. We also continue to see growing participation in the space from traditional financial institutions, including asset managers, issuers and other large counterparties. In our view, this remains one of the most important long term tailwinds for Bitgo. These institutions are generally not building infrastructure from scratch. They are looking for trusted partners that can support digital asset adoption in a regulated and scalable way. This is exactly where Bitgo is focused and where we believe we are differentiated. Our advantage is the combination of regulatory standing, security architecture and the breadth of capabilities we provide within a single integrated platform. Operationally, this was reflected in a continued deepening of client engagement across the platform, increasing our number of clients served to 5569, up 42% year over year and users to 1.2 million. Despite broader market headwinds, reported assets on platform at the end of Q1 were approximately 63 billion and reported assets staked were 11.8 billion, both down from prior periods in dollar terms, primarily as a result of lower digital asset prices during the quarter. Because digital asset prices can materially impact reported asset values. We also evaluate underlying asset growth on a price normalized basis. We believe this more accurately reflects the fundamental growth of the business, client inflows and Bitgo's continued market share gains independent of the market price movement using current quarter digital asset prices. Across all periods, normalized assets on platform actually grew 29% year over year and 10% sequentially. Normalized stake balances grew 21% year over year and 27% sequentially. Bitcoin and Ethereum balances on the platform grew 131% year over year and 7% sequentially. Taken together, we believe these demonstrate continued underlying momentum across the business despite the broader market volatility. Let's now dive into some key operational and commercial highlights from quarter one a key focus throughout Q1 was continuing to broaden the reach of our institutional platform through expanded commercial relationships and partnerships. For example, in Q1 we significantly expanded our partnership with 21 shares with one of the world's largest issuers of cryptocurrency exchange traded products. This highlights the underlying demand for regulated crypto exposure in key markets around the world, including throughout Europe, and builds upon Bitco's existing markets. Additionally, just a few weeks ago we announced plans with OKEx, a leading crypto exchange, to bring automated off exchange settlement infrastructure to institutional clients trading on OKEX in the US this is an example of Bitco helping solve structural challenges for institutional trading, which has historically required institutions to pre fund assets on exchanges and take counterparty risk against those exchanges. It addresses the growing demand from institutions to separate custody from trading risk. We believe this is a major milestone for the industry, clearly establishing Bitgo as the leader in institutional settlement. Beyond these announced partnerships, we also deepened relationships across a broader set of institutional clients, exchanges, asset managers and ecosystem partners during the quarter, including several strategic engagements that have not yet been publicly disclosed. These partnerships are important not simply because of their headline value, but because they reflect the increasingly strategic role Bitgo plays within the institutional digital asset workflows. They demonstrate that institutions are choosing Bitco not only for custody, but as a premier core infrastructure partner to support broader operational and financial activity. Throughout the quarter. We continue to extend our product capabilities into strategic growth areas. As I touched on earlier, we launched derivatives trading in January to support growing client demand for tools that help manage volatility, hedge exposure, generate yield and structure risk more efficiently. Adoption in the first quarter of launch has been encouraging and we have already seen meaningful engagement across the platform. Importantly, some existing spot clients are now incorporating derivatives into broader workflows within Bitco which is exactly the type of cross product adoption we want to drive over time. Stablecoins is another area where we made meaningful progress and where we continue to see significant long term opportunity. We have said consistently that stablecoin infrastructure can become one of the most important growth areas for Bitcoin over time and this quarter reinforced that view. Stablecoin infrastructure is one of the clearest examples of how Bitgo's platform extends beyond trading into broader financial and payments workflows. During and shortly after quarter end, we launched Bitco Mint, a one stop portal where clients can mint burn and convert stablecoins from one type to another. We also continue to support clients and partners across reserve management, transaction processing and the broader operational stack around stablecoins. When we look at client conversations today, the range of stablecoin use cases is getting broader across payments, Treasury Management, settlement, tokenized asset infrastructure and embedded financial applications. We believe Bitco is well positioned to benefit from these trends and we're pleased to announce several stablecoin related commercial partnerships and including with Stablec, SOFI and the Better Money Company on financing and broader institutional workflows. We launched our Unified Financing platform and further expanded Prime Services capabilities including additional Risk management, Structured products financing and treasury tools. These investments are strategically important. Each time we add a new capability that helps clients keep more workflows inside the Bitco ecosystem, we deepen client engagement and increase the overall utility of the platform and make Bitgo more central to how those clients operate. Geographic expansion has also remained an important priority this quarter. Bitco was named issuer and primary custodian for fyusd, a US dollar backed stablecoin designed for institutional adoption across Asian markets in Europe. Beyond the 21Shares partnership, we added new traders to Bitcoin Prime's liquidity network in April, improving execution for our clients on our regulated infrastructure. I'd like to now provide some context on the financial results before I hand this over to Ed for a more detailed discussion. We were not insulated from the market environment, softer market conditions, reduced activities in parts of the business and the non cash markdown on our digital assets. Treasury weighed on GAAP earnings. However, despite this environment, the underlying economics of the business remained resilient while relative to broader market conditions as they were supported by continued market share gains, improved monetization across several of our core business lines and ongoing client engagement across the platform. At the same time, we continue to invest in the strategic areas we believe will drive durable long term growth such as product platform, regulatory capability and go-to-market execution. Having operated through multiple up and down cycles in our 13 year history. We believe periods like this often create the best opportunities to strengthen the business and deepen our long term competitive position. Looking ahead, some parts of the business remain sensitive to market activity and token prices, while other parts are benefiting from onboarding, product expansion and continued traction with clients and partners. Ed will take you through that in more detail, including the financial bridge for the quarter and the key drivers across each business line. Before I hand it over, I want to close with a broader perspective on where we see the industry heading Institutions continue to move into digital assets. Stablecoins continue to become more relevant to real world payments and financial workflows. Tokenization continues to create new infrastructure needs. At the same time, regulatory clarity continues to improve across key jurisdictions, including constructive momentum in the United States around market structure and digital asset legislation such as the Clarity Act. We believe greater regulatory clarity is one of the key factors that can further accelerate institutional adoption and BICO's total addressable market over time, particularly as traditional financial institutions seek clearer regulatory frameworks before committing additional capital and resources into the digital asset market. As the market matures, clients increasingly want trusted regulated integrated partners rather than fragmented piecemeal solutions. We believe those structural trends continue to support the long term demand environment for Bitco. Periods like this often separate businesses that are simply exposed to market activity from businesses that are building durable value. Our role is not to call the market. Our job is to continue strengthening the platform and deepening the client relationships and positioning the business to emerge stronger as adoption expands. We did that in Q1. Now I'll turn it over to Ed.
Ed Reginelli (Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you Mike and thank you everyone for joining us today. Let me start with the consolidated financial view and then walk through each of our major offerings. In the first quarter, total revenue was $3.8 billion, up 113% year over year and down 39% sequentially. The year over year increase reflects a larger digital asset sales business and a broader contribution from stablecoin as a service relative to prior year quarter. The sequential decline was primarily the result of lower digital asset sales activity in a soft crypto market environment. As Mike noted, the headline percentage change overstates the decline in trading revenue as a portion of spot trading activity has shifted to derivatives, which are reported on a net rather than gross basis. For that reason, we do not think that analyzing total revenue alone fully captures the underlying economics of the quarter. While total revenue declined 39% sequentially, direct costs also declined at a similar rate. At the same time, margins and take rates improved across digital asset sales staking and stablecoin as a service. As a result, the sequential decline in total revenue was more pronounced than the change in the underlying economics of the business. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $1.7 million in the quarter compared with a positive $3.9 million in Q1 of last year and a positive $12.1 million in Q4. The year over year and sequential change reflected weaker market conditions, lower subscriptions and services revenue and continued investment in the business. It also included approximately $3 million of one time legal, professional costs and other one time charges associated with the IPO process and other strategic initiatives. GAAP net loss was $60.7 million in the quarter compared with a net loss of $25.7 million in Q1 of last year and a net loss of $50 million in Q4. The primary driver of that result was negative mark to market adjustments on digital assets as well as elevated IPO-related stock based compensation expense which we expect to normalize from Q1 26 levels going forward. Let me now move to the offerings starting with digital asset sales. Revenue for digital asset sales was $3.7 billion, up 128% year over year and down 39% sequentially. While overall trading activity reflects a weaker market environment, the underlying economics of the business improved during the quarter on a normalized basis excluding the accounting impact of the derivatives mix shift. Our underlying trading economics outperformed the broader market sequentially and significantly outperformed on a year over year basis. We believe this reflects continued market share gains in institutional digital asset trading. Overall margin was 32 basis points compared with 20 basis points a year ago and 24 basis points in Q4, primarily driven by the contribution from derivatives activity following the launch of the offering on January 1st of this year. Strategically, we view derivatives as an important extension of Bitco's platform. Clients increasingly want integrated workflows that include risk management, hedging, yield generation and structured solutions alongside spot execution. Expanding those capabilities strengthens client engagement and increases strategic relevance of our trading platform over time. Turning to staking revenue was $49.4 million, down 66% year over year and 15% sequentially, primarily reflecting lower token prices. Staking take rates increased 16.1% from 7.6% in Q4 and 12.5% in the prior year quarter driven by additional token onboarding and a more favorable validator mix including the contribution of the higher economics of the Canton related activity. While the current mix may vary over time, the broader takeaway is that we are improving the economic quality of this business line while continuing to expand token support, subscriptions and services. Revenue was $25.6 million up 11% year over year and down 35% sequentially. The sequential decline primarily reflected a lower level of one time ecosystem and implementation oriented projects compared with Q4 when activity in this area was elevated. While these projects are not recurring in nature, they remain strategically important because they often support token onboarding, client implementations and broader downstream revenue opportunities across the platform. As a result, we do not view the sequential revenue decline as representative of the underlying health of the recurring revenue base. Stablecoin as a service continued to be the bright spot during the quarter. Revenue was $38.2 million up 44% sequentially. Take rate improved to 7.4% from 5.5% in Q4. Growth was driven by continued client adoption, product enhancements and new partnerships. We view stablecoin infrastructure as a significant long term growth opportunity for Bitco supported by expanding adoption across payments, settlement, treasury management and broader financial applications. Finally, interest income was $0.9 million up 259% year over year and 89% sequentially. Turning now to expenses, the most important point is that the quarter reflects both temporary and strategic factors. We incurred approximately $3 million of one time legal and professional fees related to the IPO process and other strategic initiatives. Our stock based compensation of $11.2 million was also elevated during the quarter compared to $0.8 million in Q4 of 2025. We expect a moderation in share based expense on a go forward basis during the quarter. We continue to invest in talent, product development and platform capabilities as part of a deliberate long term strategy. We are managing the business with discipline, but we are not managing the business to maximize 1/4 of profitability at the expense of our long term growth opportunity. Our balance sheet remains Strong including approximately $186.6 million of cash and $167.1 million of Bitcoin held in treasury on the balance sheet as of the quarter end. Combined with our Capital Light model, this provides the flexibility to invest through the current cycle, support client activity across the platform and pursue strategic growth opportunities from a position of strength. I'd also like to briefly touch on the higher interest expense in the quarter. This reflects funding used to support customer borrowing and lending activity on the platform. Importantly, this was operational in nature rather than corporate financing and helps enable revenue generating client workflows within the business. Moving now to Our outlook for Q2 2026 based on quarter to date trends, we are assuming that Digital asset market conditions will remain broadly consistent with current levels, building on the stronger performance observed at the end of the first quarter. Digital asset sales revenue is expected to remain broadly consistent with Q1, with margins anticipated to be comparable. Assuming a similar mix of derivatives and spot trading activity. Current trends indicate strong year over year growth for the quarter. Staking revenue is expected to remain broadly consistent with Q1 supported by continued growth in staked assets despite ongoing price volatility in key tokens, subscriptions and services. Revenue is expected to grow sequentially on a reported basis supported by client growth across custody and wallets, while also benefiting from non recurring ecosystem and implementation related work. Stablecoin as a service revenue is expected to grow modestly sequentially supported by ongoing client adoption and new partnerships. Total expenses for the second quarter, excluding direct costs associated with digital asset sales staking and stablecoin as a service are expected to decrease from Q1 levels with which were driven by IPO-related charges during the quarter and normalization of stock based compensation. The company will continue to invest in long term platform growth and go to market execution. With that, I'll turn it back to the operator to open the call for questions.
OPERATOR
We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star1 again. Please pick up your handset when asking your question. If you're muted locally, remember to unmute your device. Please stand by now while we compile the Q and A roster. Your first question comes from the line of James Yarrow with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
James Yarrow (Analyst)
Good afternoon Mike. I'd love to to just get a little bit of an update around the stablecoins and service demand from partners and I guess how this has evolved as the Clarity act progresses and then maybe longer term, how would you expect the act passing to impact the demand?
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Hey thanks James. Appreciate the question. Good to speak to you all. In terms of stablecoins continues to grow strong. I mean basically everybody's out there looking at Clarity Act and Genius which doesn't allow interest. And so if you have a broad distribution of users at your bank or financial institution, you're faced with a choice. Do you a launch your own stablecoin and then be able to participate in the yield, use it with your partners, use it for your business in some way or do you give that up to somebody else who's going to instead take that? So in general just strong interest? I know, others have cited, you know, lengthy pipeline. I've got a couple of deals we can't announce yet, but continues to look really positive. Also we did just extend our USD1 contract. So we're happy that that partnership has been doing fantastic.
James Yarrow (Analyst)
Thanks Mike. That's really helpful. Just as a follow up, sort of a similar question around tokenization facilitating, you know, tokenization projects and how you see the opportunity set for your business there.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Look, I think tokenized equities have really exploded in the last six months. There's at least four kind of different models for how to bring tokenized equities to market. We're proud that we participated, actually participating with all of them. Just, you know, we are infrastructure. So one of the benefits of being infrastructure is that we participate on all of these and then we work with the clients, kind of forge them. I think the market's going to figure out which of these work best. So you know, the first one that we're proud of is, you know, we, we are the sole custodian within the Figure Markets ecosystem and they started I think in February. Obviously they've got one model which uses, you know, Provenance and Figure's ATS. So that's been been kicked off. On top of that there's tokenized wrappers that exist. There's a couple of different players pursuing that. You saw DTCC just announcing that they've got a plan to go to market. We will be participating with all these and we think it opens up our business tremendously, you know, kind of towards how we grow in the direction of prime brokerage. So anyway, we're very excited about this. We're heavily investing in it and more to come.
James Yarrow (Analyst)
Very helpful. Thanks Mike.
Pete Christianson (Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Pete Christianson with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Thank you. I appreciate the question here. Mike, back on stablecoins as a service, what degree are is Bitco involved in the design and construction of the networking, meaning connecting with other partners which may not be part of the Bitco client ecosystem. My thinking is there's an opportunity from a lead gen perspective for services with stablecoins as a service emanating from one particular client to others. Just wondering if you could provide some color on that and curious on any learnings here on scaling this business and what it could mean for potentially launching L1 as a service at some point. Thank you.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Great, thanks Pete. Let's see on the first point about stablecoins, I'm glad you're hitting this. It's a little bit of a subtle point, but one of the advantages that BitGo has with the large client base is that anyone that launches their stablecoin directly with BitGo immediately plugs into an entire network. And if you recall, at the bottom of our stack we have our self custody wallet platform that's distributed all over the planet. Hundreds of exchanges and broker dealers are using that. As soon as you light up on the BitGo API, you light up on all of those parties. Additionally, I think some of the traditional folks that are coming into the space are a little bit more, if you want to use Peter Thiel's analogy of zero-to-one, they're really more like the one to many and BitGo's kind of like the zero to one. I do think it's a different skill set of how do you take a product which currently isn't deployed and get the flywheel spinning and grow it? So BitGo's got tremendous reach into the DeFi ecosystem, into the crypto ecosystem. Obviously we've got partners and hedge funds and venture funds and all others. So when folks use the BitGo platform for stablecoins, we definitely are actively working with, helping them. And you've seen historically there's been a few stable coins that launched several years ago and they, they pretty much stayed kind of at zero for a long period of time. And that's because of not having necessarily really good, good go-to-market plans. So we definitely help our clients with this. We're motivated and interested and incentivized to do so. And I think that's one of the advantages of using the BitCo stablecoin platform. I'm sorry, you had a second part of the question. What did you ask Ian? Oh, on the potential of taking learnings
Pete Christianson (Analyst)
and the capabilities that you have with stablecoins as a service, to potentially offering L1 as a service at some point.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Oh, for BitGo, correct. That topics come up quite a bit. I think, you know, some of the new Layer 1s, particularly around stablecoins are, are hitting a new need that you know, the, the kind of, the first generation of Layer 1s didn't solve and that's the ability to pay fees in kind of the stablecoin. So both Tempo and Arc, as you're probably aware, you know, if, if you're moving your, your stablecoin, whatever fees you pay to the chain, you actually can pay in the stablecoin itself. Whereas when stablecoins are moving on Ethereum or Solana or whatnot, you always have to, in addition to having the stablecoin, you have to have a little bit of the Layer 1 token. So I think these innovations are going to, frankly, they're kind of just required. I mean, it's annoying and a nuisance to have to pay kind of a foreign fee in order to move the stablecoin. As for BitGo's own ambitions, there could be something. We have not announced anything publicly yet, but stay tuned.
Pete Christianson (Analyst)
Thank you, Mike.
Logan
Your next question comes from the line of George Sutton with Craig Hallam. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Awesome, thanks. Hey guys, this is Logan hopping on for George. Mike, I wanted to start with sort of a specific one on Canton. Obviously you were an early supporter there and you made a few announcements since kind of this year. Expanding that partnership seems like a blockchain that we keep hearing a lot about, and it's kind of getting more business. So I wondered if you could just walk through some of the different ways that you're set to benefit from their growth and just kind of give us a sense for where that relationship could go in the future.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Sure. Thank you for the question. Let's see, took Anton. I mean, we've been a big supporter of Digital Asset, DRW, and Don Wilson for quite some time. We're proud to be the only qualified custodian on the network today. Canton deserves credit for really addressing early some of the institutional complaints that come with building applications on blockchain, in particular, privacy, in particular how you receive assets. There's been concern about dust transactions on Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. And they solve these problems. And so they've been able to bring in a number of people. They also are, I think, having kind of a second mover advantage in terms of understanding how to distribute their own token in a way that's fair and helps incentivize the network and grow before having it kind of hit the market and liquidate and cause issues. So I think they're. They're well poised. You know, the privacy. They're kind of the. The only permission privacy chain in town right now. And with the growth they've had, I think, I think they're looking good in terms of Bitgo. One of the things that's interesting about Bitgo and often difficult to describe is going into depth on a particular coin or an asset. I mean, we'll say that, hey, BitGo has wallet support for pick your favorite coin, or we have staking support. And it's easy to say we have the wallet, we have the staking. But there's also a lot of depth that goes into that. Like what features do you Support on that coin. You know what, how many staking providers are you interoperable with? Like what flexibility do clients have? And part of how we grow is by making sure that we can meet all of our clients needs. So one example specific to Canton, it's kind of a funny one I think, but it's also really important. I mentioned these dust transactions. So you know, traditional finance is often worried, well, like, you know, what happens when you're a financial institution. You receive these dust transactions on this open network and what if you didn't want it? What if it's from, you know, a bad guy? And how do you deal with that? Now my own personal opinion is that in practice these are not significant issues, but these really do trip up regulators, legal teams, you know, extensively. Canton has a feature where you can accept, you know, all the deposits and prove them. And so Bitcoin is not just integrated with the chain. We actually implement that feature. That particular feature then creates the demand for more features. It turns out that it's a little bit annoying to constantly have to approve every transaction that comes in. So then they want whitelisting and you know, ability to kind of approve those in batch and things like that. So we build those anyway, I think we're well poised. I think we're happy that we have the large network on Canton in terms of we're able to integrate with go network and other things on the go forward that should just continue expanding.
Logan
Got it. Helpful color. Second, just a quick one for me. I mean kind of putting the reporting differences aside, are you able to just kind of walk through how the net economics on spot volume compared to derivatives volume compare for you guys? Just want to get a better understanding as this shifts over time. Kind of what we'd expect to see on that net revenue line.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
I'll hand it to Ed in just a second, but some quick color. I think in the crypto markets you will see the same thing that's happened in other markets. Derivatives tend to be a better way, more economic way to trade in the industry. And so the volumes on the derivative side will continue to grow and eventually far outpace the spot markets. So we already saw in Q1 some conversion from spot market trading over to derivatives trading, which was expected and we hope to continue to grow that. So for just kind of one quarter of offering, we think that the results were pretty good and we think that that will continue. And then of course, you know, kind of our margin on a, on a derivative product is, is higher than what you would have in spot Markets. So we're happy about that as well. Ed, did I leave anything off? No.
Ed Reginelli (Chief Financial Officer)
I mean, we were, as Mike mentioned, very excited to extend some more product within our trading. Really strong client adoption and we're still very, still excited about the spot trading business. Year over year we have seen tremendous growth. We did go down sequentially and that was really just due to the fact that in Q4 we had exceptional volume from a few key clients. But overall we're excited about trading and expanding our capabilities and extending product launches that. Okay, got it. Thanks guys.
Brett Knobloch (Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Brett Knobloch with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Perfect. Thanks guys for taking my questions. Maybe just on kind of the segment stuff, the subscription services sequential decline was a bit more than I was anticipating. And I know you guys called out, maybe it was due to lower onboard or patient fees, but could you maybe provide some just color on the underlying strength in that business? I know the number of kind of clients continue to increase. You know, how did the subscription services do outside those? Maybe, you know, one time non recurring fees.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Thanks, Brett. First off, on the one time recurring fees, just so people understand what those are. You know, as we take on new coins and build them, sometimes they've got, you know, particular technology components that are extensive. And so we do charge blockchains and others onboarding fees to do that. However, what we really want to make, you know, our impact in the world is with the ongoing recurring revenues that come from real clients. So yes, the one time components came down on the subscriptions and services. You know, I think it's been in line with where we would have expected it to be, other than that we had less of the one time fees. The other thing I would point out is increasingly we are wanting to move the revenue kind of up the stack. As I mentioned before, you know, the custody fees and subscription fees by themselves, that's kind of a cost center to our clients. However, paying fees as our clients are doing work with trading and with staking and with borrow and lend, et cetera, those are where they're making money. So it's a much more palatable place for our clients to pay us fees, that does change the mix a little bit. And it's one of the challenges in describing the business is that we have multiple products and services and I don't have the stat. Maybe Ed has the stat, but you know, we shared previously, you know, about 70 to 73% of clients are using two or more products and then over half the clients using Three or more products. So we think that really if we can bring clients in and we lead with, you know, custody is the way they come in and it's usually what we're known for, but they grow into these other products and services. And we think that's the strength, Ed.
Ed Reginelli (Chief Financial Officer)
Now we've, we've seen tremendous growth in number of clients utilizing our custody and wallet products. And that's somewhat of a recurring revenue stream. So that story remains very strong. Again, the big story there was in Q4, we did experience a very large volume of ecosystem projects, excluding that the business performed very strong year on year, first of all, and then also sequentially. So overall we're still very optimistic about our customer pipeline and, and that business, that part of our business growing. Awesome. And maybe if I could just follow up on the statement side. Yeah, go ahead, Mike.
Brett Knobloch (Analyst)
Yeah, go ahead. If you had another point on that. Sorry.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
You know, the. One of the things I would like to figure out how to do really well with all of you guys is how do we differentiate the Bitco performance from, you know, the market price volatility performance? And obviously we don't consider ourselves to be a huge impact on the latter, although hopefully we have an impact to some degree, but really we want to focus on the former. So the normalized numbers that we discussed on the call, I think looked pretty encouraging as long as we are. And it doesn't really matter where you pin the prices, so you can pin it to the beginning of the period, the end of the period. In all cases. We saw significant growth both on the assets on platform and also on the assets under stake. So the revenue that we'll get on, you know, the logistic custody component will be down from the US Dollar notional, sorry, the US dollar pricing. But in terms of the actual assets on platform, we see good growth there. So we're happy about that for the future.
Brett Knobloch (Analyst)
Helpful. And then just on the staking front, obviously asset stake decline, that's general declines in asset prices. But it looked like the take rate there ticked up a good bit. If I'm just doing kind of beginning of period and the period average almost like doubled quarter over quarter, I guess. Did you guys take up pricing on the staking side?
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, we had a couple of different things. We had a change in the mix of some of the partners that we work with. And then also some of the coins are stronger in terms of the rates we get on those. So those have been positive for us. And then lastly, as we did note on the call on a normalized basis the overall assets under stake did grow. Remember the assets that you stake is basically the non bitcoin assets which is like the one set of assets are even more volatile than bitcoin. So.
Ed Reginelli (Chief Financial Officer)
And the only I guess thing I will add to that is the what was your last time I might do? I think you covered it, Mike. You covered one thing. I knew I was going to say the. The only thing I would add is in addition to a positive validator mix, as we get to a certain size and volume with certain coins, we're able to push a lot of that staking capability to our own nodes where we appreciate a much higher margin. So that's also helping support the margin growth. That's a good flag. Thanks Ed. Thank you guys, really appreciate it.
Ed Engel
Right, your next question comes from the line of Ed Engel with Compass Point. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks for taking the question question on the increased stablecoin take rate. Any more color on what's driving know that there is moving pieces between partnership mix and then I guess maybe some transaction revenue. I just want to kind of get an idea of if transaction revenues actually started to drive that business rather than just interest income. Thanks. Actually I think it's. It's mostly that kick starting the business. We actually gave some discounts kind of on the early piece when coins are growing and then now we've kind of graduated beyond that. So the, the take rate just goes up as a result of that. That's the main one. In terms of stablecoin conversions we do, we do a lot of stablecoin conversions. Those are relatively low margin and those show up more in the trading side rather than under the stablecoin numbers. Great, thanks for that. And then I guess on the OKX integration for off exchange settlement it kind of seems like it's just a matter of time before this structure becomes kind of the standard industry. Just curious like how do these integrations I guess help the business just economically? Is there, is it more of a way to kind of gain and maintain market share or actually would monetize some of those trading fees? Yeah, great, great question. Look, part of it is you get the access on platform and then you have the opportunity to address those clients in many ways. So we're trying to help make the settlement network just be the strongest, largest volume that's, that's out there and the most important place to be is on the the largest exchanges. So you know the big three is Finance and OKX and Bybit. So this is, this is one of the Big ones. And we're really excited about the fact that we have it. And then in terms of how we make money, I think one of the, one of the elements of the crypto industry that hasn't been fully considered, you know, through Most of our 10 year history is how to price risk. So remember, when you're, when you're doing trading, there's three components of pricing. Number one is okay, what's the cost? The underlying asset that you're trading? Number two is how much profit do you want to take? 5 bips, 10 bips, 100 bps. And the third one is what is your risk? And because crypto markets are highly volatile, relatively new, require pre funding out of exchanges. The measurement of that risk is super tough. And of course the industry has seen big penalties like what happened when FTX had a blowout back in 2022. So the main thing that our clients get out of having off exchange settlement is reduced risk and the ability to start actually measuring and quantifying the risk so that they can get their prices right. I think so far what's been happening is we have really wide margins on the, on the profit side. And then people just say, well, that's big enough. It'll cover some of the risk that I'm taking now with the ability to trade without having to pre fund various venues, you take out that risk and you can start to quantify it for real. So this is going to bring prices kind of back. And you know, we see Charles Schwab came in, I think what were they going to be at? 75 basis points on their retail trading. And then Morgan Stanley has now announced that they're going to do 50bps on their retail trading. You know, as they bring their, their rates down, they are going to increasingly have to figure out how they're going to measure and control the risk that they're taking. And I think they're going to, they're going to find Bitcoin Settlement Network to be a very satisfying place to. Great, thank you.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Brian Dobson with Clear Street. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Brian Dobson (Analyst)
Hey, good evening. Thanks for taking my question. So at the top of the call, you spoke a little bit about growing your share of a client's business organically over time. Can you give us a little bit
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
of color on what that looks like and how you're thinking about client acquisition costs? Yeah, look, it's been one of, thank you, Brian. It's been one of our key metrics, you know, since our, our IPO day back. Back in January. But I mean, before that, internally, look, overall, the. The market is simply expanding. And what started out, you know, a decade ago as primarily Bitcoin and then expanded into a few other assets and then ICOs, and now it's grown into stable coins and deFi. You know, it's. It's about to go into tokenized equities. So the, the more clients you have on platform, the more it means that your clients are going to be able to match each other on the settlement network and whatnot. So we look for partnerships where we can have a partnership that brings on more clients. The OKX platform, I'm sorry, OKX integration is no exception. By doing that deal, we can now work to Find clients that we have in common. Sometimes we're helping OKX with getting more clients, sometimes they're helping us with getting more clients.
Brian Dobson (Analyst)
Basically, anywhere that we can find a partnership where one client gets more clients, we consider that a win. Great. Thanks very much.
Joe Vafi (Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Joe Vafi with Canaccourt Genuity. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hey guys, good afternoon. Thanks for the question here. Just maybe we talk about the loan book a little bit, how you're thinking about that strategically, you know, where it may go from here, how it's performing here in the spot volatility market, and then quick follow up after that.
Ed Reginelli (Chief Financial Officer)
Thanks, Joe. Ed, you want to answer on where we're at right now? Sure, I'll answer after that. Yeah.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
So the loan book is currently roughly around $200 million outstanding. With client facing. We believe there's an incredible opportunity ahead of us that we had mentioned, Joe, in the past, that our problem is we have more demand than we have supply of dollars to lend. A lot of the clients are looking for US Dollars to borrow, so we try to Find unique ways of bringing in additional dollars. Obviously, the IPO was very helpful in bringing in some additional funds to the company to support the program. So we'll continue to keep building that program, but again, the opportunity that we see there is huge.
Joe Vafi (Analyst)
And then just adding into this, part of why I'm excited about the tokenized equities is like, I think there's tremendous demand to borrow against fully collateralized, you know, fully collateralized positions against all kinds of things. And while there was a healthy market borrowing against fully collateralized in bitcoin, there's a lot more people that have equities that they would be willing to apply towards this than there are people that are holding just bitcoin. So we think it's going to greatly grow the market once we've got tokenized equities on chain.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
That's great. I didn't actually think about that, Mike. And opening up that margin lending market on tokenized equities. And then yeah, just maybe, yeah, maybe. Kind of talk about a little bit of the mechanics of maybe some of your, your customers switching some trading volume from spot to derivatives. You know, it feels like if they wanted to do derivatives trading volumes, they could perhaps have been doing those away from you to begin with. So just, you know, wanted to drill down on the motivations of clients of, you know, of that mix shift from there and. Thank you very much.
OPERATOR
Thank you. One of the least sexy things that we do, but probably the most important things that we do is getting the regulatory right behind what we do at Bitgo. So our clients very much appreciate that we are occ, Chartered National Bank. They very much appreciate the regulatory standing that we have across the globe. Whether you're talking about Germany or Dubai or Singapore. And in general, once they've gone through the onboarding and diligence process with Bitco, it's difficult to replicate that with multiple partners. So you're absolutely right. They could have traded in derivatives last year, the year before with a number of different parties. Oftentimes that means opening accounts offshore. Oftentimes that means just opening accounts with, you know, crypto native firms that may not match the kind of profile that they're looking to work with. So the desire to have this one stop where they come to Bitco, we are their counterparty, they know who we are. They've been through our insurance, they've been through our SOC1, our SOC2 and all of our regulatory analysis and now they're ready to do these activities. So you're right, they would have participated before. They just didn't have quite the right partner and they're very happy to have.
Chris Brendler (Analyst)
In the interest of time, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question only for the remainder of the Q and A. Your next question comes from the line of Chris Brendler with Rosenblatt. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks and good afternoon guys. Just wanted to dig a little deeper on the derivatives business. Obviously it's still early days but a good start for that business. And I just wanted to know, you know, as you think about the impact on the net margin there, is it safe to assume that the increase you've seen there is the majority of the increase we've seen there or maybe all of the increase we've seen in that net capture rate has been due to the addition of driven revenue without denominator impact. And then can you talk at all about, you know, how you expect that business to contribute in the second quarter? And then I also had one follow up on the stablecoin as a service business. Just, you know, more detail on the growth in partners there and how the book will look as you grow away from just having the World Liberty. You know, how significant are the non World Liberty assets expected to be as you progress through the year? Thank you.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Thanks Chris. I can add this, dad.
Ed Reginelli (Chief Financial Officer)
Yes. So the take rate or the margin that we saw during Q1 as we referenced was benefiting from the net reporting of derivatives. If you just look at the spot business, it's very consistent to what we experienced in Q4. So those margins haven't varied very much and we continue to experience that into the future as we get more and more of the derivative trades that will hopefully help influence our net take rate much higher to the future.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
And then on the stable coins, I'm not sure how to quite answer it. We do have some clients we can't pre announce. It's unfortunate. So we can't announce clients that are not ready to be announced yet. So unfortunately enough to ask you to stay tuned on the I guess one thing I didn't mention, but you probably have seen it this this last quarter we did launch what we call our Mint and Burn center. It's a place where all of our, you know, 5,600 clients can mint and burn directly in the assets that are straight from Bitco. We've got partnerships, you know, the intention is not to limit it to just the Bitco stable coins and then you can convert between stable coins all kind of right there. Additionally you can do it programmatically so it's super easy. If you've got your agentic bots running, they can completely through API do these types of conversions as well. I think there's probably more agentic announcements that have happened so far than real meaningful deployments, but we do see this as an important part for the future.
Dan Dolef (Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Dan Dolef with Mizuhi. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hey guys, really nice results here. Congrats from from us. I have a question on the bank and Trust. So Bitcoin now holds bank and Trust, National Bank Charger Charter from the occ. This puts you in our view in a pretty exclusive category amongst crypto native firms. Maybe beyond the obvious Trust and Compliance signaling. What does the charter concretely unlock in terms of new revenue lines? Thank you.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Thanks for asking. Actually, by the way, one thing I'd like to impress upon folks that may not be aware of kind of Vico's history, I think we might be the first OCC-chartered bank that converted in a day. And usually what happens is, and there's a lot of people that are in the application process with the occ, usually what happens, you get a conditional approval and then it can be like 9, 12, 18 months while you go and build the necessities fee at the OCC level of a bank. In Bitco's case, we were conditionally approved. We had to write a check to fill the regulatory capital and the next day we were operating. So, you know, doing these activities is something we've been doing for a long time. And so to answer your question, the reason that's important is because, you know, when we built Bitco Trust Company out of South Dakota back in 2018, it was pretty limited in scope of what it could do. I mean, all we wanted to do was to be able to kind of hold these assets in a fiduciary manner in a way that was bankruptcy remote, that was safe for our clients, our institutional clients to understand. But then every time we wanted to do something new, it was like more licensing, it was more updates to the business plan, working with the regulators and it was kind of. So as we went into the OCC process, you know, we put everything in there. So from trading to staking, to of course, custody, etc, these are all things that the regulator is familiar with in our business, part of our business plan. The OCC has, has worked with us on, and by the way, they've been great, really appreciative of, of their efforts there. So overall we feel like we've got the best standing with that OCC charter and the business plan that's approved in there. So it's pretty, pretty all inclusive. So I don't know if you had a particular area that you wanted to drill into, but I mean, look, obviously the, the services that we have up on top of custody already, those are where we're growing. And then this all grows towards prime brokers.
Cassie Chan (Analyst)
Your next question comes from the line of Cassie Chan with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Great guys, thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask, you know, it seems like the number of clients continues to grow and ticked up again this quarter how often all of the profile of these clients have changed in terms of AUM or Are they actually using, you know, multiple products in addition to custody right from the start now just curious if that's evolved as well. Thank you. Thanks Cassie. What I mentioned earlier, look, we have a lot of crossover between our services for our clients. That continues to do well for us. We should probably measure it for the next, the next reporting period. Maybe we'll talk about it next time more. But it's all I think been positive the profile of the client is changing in terms of we have this whole new addressable market which is the traditional financial firms coming to Bitcoast. So also have some announcements here that are not yet announced yet, but deals that are already signed and Inc. Which you will be hearing about I think in this quarter which are exciting from firms that you know, just a year ago would not have been listed in any type of crypto or digital asset related product. So we are seeing that, that shift. I do think clarity remains the next,
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
I don't know if I want to call it a hurdle, maybe the next graduation point where a number of, maybe the more conservative firms will also be looking and solidifying their digital asset plans. But right now it seems like everybody's growing and you can see there's a heated race among the new entrants to try to be fastest and the best. So I think that is creating a bit of FOMO among those players that have not been in digital assets yet. And we are seeing all of those and all of those RFIs and all those RFPs.
Stephen Glagola (Analyst)
Your final question comes from the line of Stephen Glagola with kbw. Your line is open.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
Hi, thanks. Thanks Mike and Ed for the question. Can you unpack more on some of the prepared remarks around? How are you guys thinking about balancing the reinvestment and strategic growth initiatives around, you know, product platform regulatory capability that you called out while also driving operating leverage for sustAIned positive and growing EBITDA over time? Thank you.
OPERATOR
Yeah. Great. So we've been through I think three or four kind of up and down cycles in Bitcoin over the years and sometimes these down cycles are the best times to be building and especially AI is absolutely helping us on the build. So we don't see any need for like additional costs of any, any material type. Of course we're always watching to see, you know, where are the cost of the business. We did have one time expenses around, you know, the IPO itself and some legal costs that are associated with that. I think those were typical. And then for the most part like we're, we're building. I think there is A strong demand for this tokenized equities component. And you know, being first, you know, one of the things we have is I think the broadest support of L1s and L2s of any major custodian, certainly much larger than Coinbase and Anchorage. And staying ahead there does require, you know, that we continue to build. So we will continue to build there. But of course we're always watching the bottom line. We want to make sure that we are building a healthy business. I think that we're well within that those parameters right now. And then as the market exits its bear cycle, I think you're going to see real wins on all the economic measures that are going.
Mike Belshee (Founder and CEO)
We have reached the end of the question and answer session. I will now turn the call back to Mike Balschi for closing remarks.
OPERATOR
Thanks everybody for joining us today. So to close, I just want to come back to three points. First, underlying monetization has held up better than the gross revenue presentation would suggest. We are encouraged to see our team launching our derivatives trading products. As we talked about our overall, our higher overall margin and take rates across digital asset sales taking and stable things of service are great. Second, and most importantly, we continue to strengthen the business itself. We launched new capabilities, expanded business lines, we added clients and partners, we advanced the stablecoin infrastructure and continued investing in the people and the platform that we believe will drive long term benefits and growth. So that's the business we're building and it's the lens through which we believe investors should evaluate our progress as well. Finally, Bitcoin remains uniquely positioned as the institutional grade digital asset infrastructure platform. It's secure regulated control layer for digital assets and all the new entrants see that capability. Our advantage is the combination of regulatory standing, security architecture and the breadth of capabilities that we provide within a single integrated platform. We're operating in a large and evolving market and we continue to see encouraging demand across all areas of the business. Importantly, while reported asset values were impacted by lower digital asset prices during the quarter, you know, the normalized assets on platform and normalized state balances continue to grow meaningfully, which we believe will drive upside in our model as the digital asset prices recover. So thank you everybody.
Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.
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