Text | Lin Wanwan

Editor | Jack

In the world of cryptocurrency, the loudest sounds are not the clanging of bells and drums of trading, but the connections that can quietly secure $9 billion.

In July 2025, 80,000 dormant Bitcoin addresses that had been inactive for 14 years suddenly moved their assets, marking one of the largest nominal Bitcoin transactions in history. Such a large transfer should have triggered a 30% market drop, but the reality was—there was no significant crash, no panic; this batch of Bitcoin was quietly absorbed by the market.

$9 billion worth of chips were "silently" consumed by the market. The operator was neither an exchange nor a hedge fund, but a somewhat obscure Wall Street player: Galaxy Digital.

During the latest Q2 earnings call on August 5, someone asked the CEO: How did you acquire the 80,000 BTC client? Was there a formal bidding process?

The CEO casually replied, "This deal is more about relationships than quotes."

Moreover, the Chinese billionaire CZ personally took charge of the BNB treasury company, which has quietly recruited former Galaxy Digital co-founder David Namdar as CEO.

Who exactly is behind Galaxy Digital? What kind of political and business resources were utilized to execute these epic transactions? And what new power structure is this network creating for the crypto world?

High-Level "Circle of Friends": Political Capital in the Boardroom

The key to this transaction lies not in the quotes on stage, but in the connections behind the scenes—all pointing to an old Wall Street figure.

The 56-year-old founder Mike Novogratz is a standard "Wall Street creation."

He worked at Goldman Sachs for 11 years, starting from the Southeast Asia futures desk and eventually becoming a partner in fixed income. At that time, Novogratz was one of the few who could navigate between macro trading, asset portfolios, and national policies.

He then joined Fortress Investment Group, leading macro strategy investments and was one of the key figures to bet on emerging markets and sovereign debt early on. During that period, he frequently interacted with policy institutions, central banks, and market departments in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, negotiating bond issuances and exchange rate policies with local governments, becoming familiar with the game logic between leverage and sovereignty in the "gray areas."

From 2012 to 2015, he became a member of the New York Federal Reserve's Investment Advisory Committee, directly participating in policy consulting, monetary mechanism research, and financial institution evaluations. This gave him a rare "dual capability"—understanding both derivatives trading and the language and rhythm of regulatory bodies.

He is someone who has been dealing with the intersection of political power, Wall Street capital, and information for over a decade.

As early as 2013, he invested heavily in Bitcoin and Ethereum with his own funds, totaling about $7 million. By 2017, he publicly stated in a CNBC interview, "In the past two years, I made over $250 million from crypto assets."

However, he is not a "native" of the crypto industry, nor a typical speculator. His real pivot occurred in 2015—when he suffered losses from a heavy investment in the Brazilian interest rate market, he exited Fortress and briefly retreated from frontline investment. It was during this "gap period" that he first seriously examined Bitcoin and reestablished his understanding of currency, credit, and financial infrastructure.

But Novogratz did not stop at merely "holding Bitcoin" like many early crypto evangelists. His ambition is to establish a new "financial system design" for the on-chain world. He said, "What I see is a systemic void—liquidity in the crypto world is deepening, but there is no structure."

In his view, the entire chain of asset management, market making, clearing, ETF custody, PIPE financing, audit disclosure, and regulatory lobbying that exists in the traditional financial world is almost non-existent in the crypto world. This is a "systemic wasteland" that urgently needs reconstruction.

Galaxy Digital was born in this structural gap.

In 2018, Novogratz personally invested $350 million, successfully listing through a reverse merger with the Canadian shell company Bradmer Pharmaceuticals, becoming the first crypto financial platform to provide full-stack services to institutions. This is a company designed to be the "Wall Street version of an on-chain investment bank."

However, the journey from the Canadian exchange to NASDAQ took Galaxy Digital a total of 1,320 days, nearly four years. During this time, the company underwent nine rounds of feedback from the SEC, countless legal reviews, and invested over $25 million to meet compliance requirements. In a regulatory winter where the entire crypto industry faced obstacles and frequently "went overseas," Galaxy persevered.

It is not a trading platform, nor a VC, but a "financial structure service provider" in the crypto field. Galaxy Digital is designed to be the "Wall Street version of on-chain Goldman Sachs." Its structural design bears the imprint of his Wall Street background:

Service offerings benchmarked against Goldman Sachs: covering asset management, market making, OTC trading, proprietary research, risk management, and financial advisory; trading structures benchmarked against Citadel: supporting dark pool matching, low-latency derivatives systems, and ETF liquidity integration; policy pathways benchmarked against Brookings: establishing policy research teams, writing reports, participating in hearings, and entering regulatory sandboxes; compliance pathways benchmarked against Deloitte and EY: creating a "legal packaging system for digital assets" that supports financial reporting and audit disclosure.

At the core of all this is the "political-business circle" built by Galaxy's board of directors.

Among the board members of Galaxy Digital is Tyler Williams, who previously served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and was seconded by the current Treasury Secretary in 2025 as a special advisor on digital assets—he can translate crypto language into regulatory language and is an important bridge for Galaxy's communication with the SEC, CFTC, FASB, and other institutions.

There is also board member Doug Deason, one of the most influential real estate and energy lobbyists in Texas. He has participated in promoting several pieces of legislation related to mining sites, electricity prices, and taxes, and is a key figure behind Galaxy's successful conversion of Bitcoin mining sites into AI computing centers.

This structure, where "policy-capital-technology" converges, gives Galaxy a rare "policy influence capability" among crypto companies.

In the new financial structure he has built, Galaxy is not just trading or asset management; it is also a "legitimate electrification" service provider for traditional companies entering the on-chain world.

Compared to CZ's extreme operational capabilities and SBF's aggressive funding strategies, Mike Novogratz represents a different type of founder. He never emphasizes "decentralization," but rather "structural arrangements"; he has never used coin price as the sole metric, but pays more attention to whether privacy, regulation, systems, finance, custody, and compliance pathways are genuinely connected.

This also explains why, although Galaxy may not be the strongest in terms of traffic, it became the only player capable of securing large orders, completing settlements, and reassuring counterparties in that silent transaction of 80,000 Bitcoins.

Many people think that Galaxy Digital's moat is its capital, but the real advantage lies in its political-business sensibility.

The Bankers Behind the Crypto Treasury

The 80,000 Bitcoins are just one corner of this network, with companies represented by Chinese billionaire CZ also starting to view Galaxy Digital as a "political passport" to compliance.

In mid-2025, a new mainstream narrative in U.S. stocks quietly emerged: crypto stock. The U.S. stock market is undergoing a capital "shell game": putting BTC and ETH into listed companies, allowing crypto assets to appear on Wall Street under the guise of financial reports.

However, until the end of 2023, this was still seen as a "forbidden zone" in the capital market.

It is actually very difficult for U.S. companies to "legally hold coins," because the financial system cannot accommodate it. According to the FASB accounting standards at the time, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could only be recorded as "intangible assets"—if the coin price fell, it had to be written down, but if it rose, it could not be counted as income, leading to serious distortions in company financial reports and making audits difficult to pass.

For example, if you bought 10,000 ETH, you had to immediately record a loss if it fell, but if it rose, you couldn't count it as profit. This made corporate financial reports look terrible and audits a mess. The new FASB regulations, which took effect in the 2025 fiscal year, allowing for "fair value" accounting where price increases could be counted as income, truly opened the door to "compliance for holding coins."

Galaxy was one of the first to enter this space and brought a number of listed companies to "legally enter" the market.

The earliest to sense the opportunity were a group of ancient ETH whales. They quietly packaged their ETH into U.S. shell companies, using a left-hand-to-right-hand approach to complete disguised cashing out without alarming the market, leveraging U.S. stock liquidity. SharpLink Gaming emerged as a leader in this "cashing out technique."

Soon, Chinese billionaire CZ followed suit—stuffing his company's platform token BNB into a U.S. company, reverse merging, packaging, and listing, turning the platform token into a compliant asset, and then entering the capital valuation system.

Behind this series of operations, Galaxy Digital has quietly surfaced—it is the orchestrating advisor of the entire script.

It customizes "crypto treasury" narrative plans for these companies: from OTC building, asset custody, to compliance disclosure and staking returns, every step is inextricably linked to the political-business channels it has built, each step precisely stepping into the gray areas between regulatory blind spots and capital leverage.

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