Nearly half of BitGo’s business now dominated by staking

BitGo, the major crypto custodian that has been in business for over a decade, is now likely dominating staking markets, the company told The Block. 

According to the firm’s last accounting, BitGo’s staking operations represent nearly $50 billion in locked value — representing roughly half of its $100+ billion assets under custody. (That said, these nominal figures were marked before the recent market pullback and are likely not representative of current fair value pricing, but its share likely remains the same.)

“We were doing some data science to determine what our peak is relative to our competitors — in real figures, at peak, we had $48 billion in TVL,” BitGo’s head of activation, who leads the team onboarding new crypto ecosystems and asked to remain anonymous, told The Block in an interview. “Obviously, prices move all the time. I couldn't tell you exact figure today.”

The move comes as BitGo, which was last valued at $1.75 billion during a $100 million raise in 2023, is reportedly making moves to go public via an initial public offering as early as Q2 2025. BitGo was almost bought out by the publicly traded Galaxy Digital before plans fell out during the 2022 market downturn.

Customer base

The growth of this side of BitGo is all the more impressive, considering its staking business is less than three years old. Indeed, it’s so young that the company missed out on the Ethereum staking boom after the network’s switch to proof-of-stake in September 2022. 

“This predates my time, but it was a missed opportunity in my opinion,” the BitGo employee said when asked if the firm works directly with the Ethereum Foundation. “That's why we don't have a lot of Ethereum staked with us — we were a bit late and they went to where they could find staking providers.”

That said, having missed out on the largest staking blockchain by total value locked, BitGo has been competitive in onboarding “newer protocols and foundations,” he said. 

The company provides staking for at least 21 different networks and has working relationships to custody and stake at least a portion of the treasury assets of several foundations, he added, mentioning Sui, Solana and Zetachain by name. Most recently, the company started working directly with Berachain.

“Proportionally, our TVL is mostly from the protocols we have tight relationships with,” he said, also mentioning BitGo often onboards a protocol’s investors “as a byproduct of working with them.”

Additionally, a number of former FTX customers are staking approximately $1 billion worth of SOL on BitGo, after the exchange's estate tapped BitGo to be the estate agent for the creditors. 

The largest staker?

Although BitGo claims to be the largest staker, only a portion of the necessary data to evaluate that claim is publicly available. 

For instance, it’s known that the permissionless Lido protocol dominates Ethereum staking, with approximately 30% of the market share. While Coinbase is also thought to be a major player, with an estimated 15% of the market, the exchange doesn’t publish full reports and so the true figure is murkier.

“Through estimates and some amount of internal connections, we estimate that Coinbase has around $20-$30 billion” in total value locked across all staking protocols, the BitGo lead said. “We're pretty confident that at $48 billion we’re well above those others.”

Future is growth

To date, BitGo has paid customers at least $500 million in staking rewards. While the custodian has historically been focused on institutions, BitGo’s “entrance into the retail space” is not necessarily off the table, given that “there's not a clear line of separation like there is in traditional finance” between institutional and retail products.” 

“You're clicking the same buttons in the same UIs,” he said. “The key piece is that it's all being done from within BitGo and your assets are still within BitGo.”

Although a relatively new line of operations, BitGo can quickly build new staking-related products by working directly “on the validator side and protocol side.” If custody is something of a solved problem in crypto — or at least a slower-moving part of it — staking represents BitGo’s “crypto-native” side. 

“We need that bleeding-edge exposure from our activator protocol team,” the employee said. “Because that's how the crypto space is going to grow. That growth is going to come from those new projects.”