BitGo

BitGo is one of the digital asset industry's earliest and largest institutional infrastructure providers, offering qualified custody, prime brokerage, wallet services, staking, and settlement infrastructure for banks, hedge funds, exchanges, protocol treasuries, and public companies. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company began by pioneering multi-signature wallet technology at a time when digital asset theft and exchange collapses were routine, and has since expanded into a full-stack platform managing assets across hundreds of blockchains, including Solana.

Background and History

BitGo was co-founded in 2013 by Mike Belshe and Ben Davenport with a specific focus on solving the security problem that plagued early crypto exchanges and retail wallets. The core insight was that requiring multiple cryptographic signatures to authorize any transaction — multi-sig — could eliminate the single-key theft vectors responsible for most losses in the industry. BitGo deployed this model commercially for institutional clients before most competitors recognized custody as a standalone business.

Over the following decade, BitGo broadened its service set and regulatory standing. In January 2026, the company completed an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BTGO, selling approximately 11 million shares at $18.00 each and raising roughly $198.5 million in gross proceeds. That listing marked one of the first dedicated digital asset infrastructure companies to go public on a major US exchange, reflecting the regulatory credibility BitGo had built through OCC federal charter status and qualifications across eight international jurisdictions.

As of early 2026, BitGo reported approximately $104 billion in assets under custody across the platform and coverage of 186 of the top 250 digital assets by market capitalization — more than any peer custodian at that time.

Core Architecture and Services

BitGo's platform operates across four primary service layers.

Self-custody wallets. Developers and institutions can create multi-signature or multi-party computation (MPC) wallets through the BitGo REST API or the self-hosted BitGo Express proxy. The Express model keeps private key operations within a client's own network, allowing full signing control without exposing keys to external infrastructure. Policy-based controls let institutions define spending limits, whitelists, and approval workflows programmatically.

Qualified custody. For institutions subject to regulatory requirements — broker-dealers, registered investment advisers, family offices, publicly traded companies — BitGo offers qualified custody with fiduciary obligations, cold storage, multi-sig controls, and documented audit trails. BitGo holds SOC-1 Type 2 and SOC-2 Type 2 certifications and maintains $250 million in insurance coverage. The company reports no hack-related losses since its founding.

Prime services. BitGo's trading infrastructure includes spot and margin execution, collateral management, financing, and institutional settlement. The platform connects to exchanges and liquidity providers through its Ecosystem product, and supports a FIX 4.4 API for clients requiring standard institutional trading connectivity. In August 2025, BitGo acquired NYDIG's institutional trading business, further expanding its execution capabilities.

Crypto-as-a-Service. For platforms embedding digital asset functionality, BitGo offers white-label wallet creation, on/off ramps, and trading through an API layer. This segment serves fintech companies, neobanks, and payment platforms that want institutional-grade backend infrastructure without building custody operations independently.

Solana Support

BitGo has built substantial Solana infrastructure, driven by growing corporate treasury adoption of SOL and by institutional demand for staking yield.

On the custody side, BitGo provides OCC-regulated qualified custody for SOL and supports the SPL token standard for Solana-native assets. Clients can hold SOL in cold storage through the same policy-enforcement and multi-sig framework used for Bitcoin and Ethereum, with reporting integrated into BitGo's broader portfolio management tools.

On staking, BitGo operates an institutional Solana staking suite that allows clients to delegate SOL to vetted validators directly from their custody wallets. In 2025, BitGo integrated Helius — Solana's largest validator — into this staking product. Through that integration, BitGo clients can delegate to Helius's zero-commission validator and receive 100% of staking rewards including both inflation emissions and MEV. Reward tracking and compounding are automated through the BitGo dashboard. BitGo also added custody support for hSOL, Helius's auto-compounding liquid staking token, enabling clients to maintain DeFi liquidity without unstaking.

WalletConnect integration further extends Solana access by allowing BitGo self-custody hot wallets to connect directly to Solana decentralized applications, giving institutions a path to DeFi participation under the same policy controls governing their core custody.

Several public companies have selected BitGo as their Solana custodian, including Solana Company (NASDAQ: HSDT) and Sharps Technology, both of which cited BitGo's combination of qualified custody, staking access, and OTC trading execution as primary reasons for the selection.

Ecosystem Breadth

BitGo added 28 new blockchain networks in 2025, illustrating the pace at which it expands coverage. Asset support spans ERC-20 tokens across Ethereum and major EVM chains, SPL tokens on Solana, and native assets on dozens of additional networks. As of Q1 2026, BitGo leads competing custodians across every market cap tier of the top 250 digital assets.

Beyond asset coverage, BitGo launched BitGo Assist in August 2026 — an AI-powered search agent embedded in its operations platform to help institutional clients navigate digital asset workflows, locate relevant policies, and surface account information. On the geographic side, BitGo Korea achieved VASP registration in August 2026, adding the Korean market to its existing qualified custody footprint across the United States, European Union, and other jurisdictions.

Role in the Solana Ecosystem

For Solana, BitGo occupies the institutional access layer: it is the infrastructure that allows regulated entities — public companies, banks, family offices, and registered funds — to hold, stake, and transact SOL within compliance and fiduciary frameworks those entities are required to operate under. As corporate SOL treasury adoption accelerates among publicly listed companies, BitGo has positioned itself as the primary custodial and staking infrastructure provider for that segment of the market, connecting institutional capital to Solana's network through a regulated, audited, and insured platform.