BitGo's Singapore bet is a test of its boring business

BitGo opened a proper Singapore office on September 2nd, two years after the Monetary Authority of Singapore licensed its local subsidiary, and it chose the moment to boast: Asia-Pacific clients have tripled over the two years since, Singapore headcount has more than doubled, and prime-brokerage activity, it says, is growing. The firm is hardly given to noise for its own sake. As the first crypto-infrastructure initial public offering of 2026 — it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in January as BTGO, the first publicly traded company with a federally chartered digital-asset trust bank in America — it is acutely aware that its shares are a referendum on a thesis.

That thesis is that the dull parts of crypto pay. In an industry of exchanges and speculators, BitGo sells custody: it stores institutions' coins, settles their trades, runs their staking and powers their stablecoins. Its advocates call it the defensive play on digital assets, and the premium its shares command over an exchange such as Coinbase rests on one claim — that more than 80% of its revenue is sticky service income rather than boom-and-bust trading fees.

The trouble is that the reported numbers do not look like that at all. BitGo booked $16.2bn of revenue in 2025, up 424%. Prise open that figure and 96% of it — $15.6bn — is "digital asset sales," the crypto that passes through its books on behalf of clients, booked at a gross margin that fell to 0.21% from 0.47%. That is a volume figure wearing revenue's clothes. The businesses that actually carry the sticky thesis — subscriptions and services ($121.5m, up 57%), staking, stablecoin-as-a-service — are by comparison a rounding error of the top line. Even those are not uniformly healthy: staking revenue fell 16% last year as the assets clients staked shrank by half.

Then there is the bottom line. Adjusted EBITDA rose ninefold to $32.4m, evidence of genuine operating leverage. But net income swung from a $156.6m profit in 2024 to a $14.8m loss in 2025, which the company attributes "materially" to falling digital-asset prices hitting its own Bitcoin treasury — roughly $344m of coins it holds on its balance sheet. Even the steady custody play, in other words, marks its earnings to the coin it stores for others. And the revenue stream the market actually tracks as the real business has drifted lower, from about $60m in the final quarter of 2025 to roughly $42m two quarters later.

It is this contrast that gives the Singapore news its weight. The expansion is not about trading volume, which is near-structural; it is one of the few concrete routes BitGo has to grow the genuinely sticky, fee-based layer on which its valuation rests. Regulated custody is scarce in Asia, where institutions are wary of offshore venues; an MAS licence is a moat, not a slogan. The firm has hired accordingly, appointing Angela Ang — the central-bank official who built Singapore's crypto-licensing regime — as head of Asia-Pacific and president of its Singapore unit, the better to shorten sales cycles with compliance-minded banks and asset managers. Tripled clients in two licensed years is early evidence that the tactic works.

None of this makes the headline growth what it appears. Separate three things: the APAC custody moat, real and worth watching; the $16.2bn top line, mostly flow-through trading; and the balance-sheet coin that swings net income. The Singapore office earns BitGo's premium only if that boring layer compounds faster than the noise around it. Two years in, the sign is encouraging; the arithmetic is not yet done.