On January 23, 2026, the news that YZi Labs participated in the BitGo (NYSE: BTGO) IPO strategic allocation stirred waves in the industry. On one side is a well-established digital asset custodian managing approximately $82 billion in assets, serving over 5,100 institutions across 100 countries. On the other side is a crypto participant known for its research and trading, extending towards upstream infrastructure. The intersection of the two on Wall Street signifies that the digital asset infrastructure regulated by the U.S. has, for the first time, collided with the traditional capital markets in such a direct manner. This article will dissect the underlying logic of YZi's bet based on BitGo's compliant trust structure and multi-jurisdictional layout, and attempt to touch upon the contours of the next round of global custody order reconstruction.
From Cold Wallets to Wall Street: BitGo's Business Leap
● Business Evolution Path: BitGo initially started with secure custody and "cold wallet" solutions, establishing a reputation in areas such as multi-signature, secure hardware, and institutional-level risk control. As institutional demand upgraded, it gradually expanded from single custody to integrated services, packaging custody, on-chain staking, and issuance services linked to various assets, providing institutions with a one-stop infrastructure for "fund entry—custody—appreciation—settlement."
● Scale and Client Profile: According to public data, BitGo currently holds approximately $82 billion in assets under custody, serving over 5,100 institutional clients across 100 countries. Its main clients include trading platforms, asset management institutions, market makers, and compliant financial institutions. This combination means that BitGo is no longer just a technology provider but a key node embedded in the global entry and exit points of crypto capital, becoming "one of the default infrastructure choices" for institutions participating in this asset class.
● Significance of Listing on the NYSE: BitGo chose to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the BTGO ticker, which serves to "legitimize" its brand on the most authoritative traditional financial stage, enhancing the trust threshold of global institutions, especially traditional financial institutions. On the other hand, its public market identity will broaden its financing channels, providing ammunition for expansion, multi-location licensing, and technological iteration in a more compliant and transparent manner, thus gaining additional survival and acquisition space in the upcoming tightening regulatory cycle.
Trust License and Multi-Jurisdictional Compliance: BitGo's Regulatory Moat
● Core Features of the Trust Structure: BitGo operates under a compliant trust structure, assuming asset custody responsibilities through a regulated trust entity within the U.S. regulatory framework. The key to the trust structure lies in the separation of legal ownership of assets and the operating entity's assets, providing clear ownership definitions and fiduciary responsibilities for client assets. This allows BitGo to have clearer responsibility boundaries and client protection mechanisms when facing regulatory scrutiny, compliance accountability, or operational entity risks.
● Multi-Jurisdictional Layout: BitGo operates in multiple jurisdictions across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, applying for or connecting with different types of licenses and exemptions based on local regulatory requirements. This layout is not merely a "point expansion" but forms a complementarity between licenses through the differences in regulatory environments across regions—strengthening trust and custody responsibilities in one area while seeking more flexible product space in another, thus providing a compliant pipeline that can operate smoothly across multiple regulatory systems for cross-border institutional clients.
● Responding to Core Institutional Demands: For large institutions, the primary concerns are asset security, legal certainty, and bankruptcy isolation capability. BitGo isolates client assets from the operating company's balance sheet through its trust structure and multi-jurisdictional compliance, legally clarifying the priority protection order in extreme situations such as liquidation and bankruptcy. This design provides a "compliance story that can be explained to boards and regulators" for the most conservative funds like sovereign wealth funds, pensions, and insurance companies, significantly reducing the resistance to "getting on board."
● Premium in a Tightening Regulatory Cycle: As global regulations on digital asset custody tighten, custodians without licenses or in regulatory gray areas will face higher compliance costs or even the risk of being forced out. In this environment, players like BitGo, which have completed their trust structure and multi-jurisdictional layout in advance, inherently possess defensive value: they can better withstand scrutiny and qualify for mergers and acquisitions and the assumption of existing assets during industry consolidation, thus gaining a "compliance premium" in valuation and business.
YZi Seizing Upstream: Why Bet on BitGo
● Market Consensus on Strategic Pillars: Voices in the market have pointed out that "U.S.-regulated digital asset infrastructure will become a long-term strategic pillar," which is a footnote to YZi Labs' public investment stance in BitGo. For participants hoping to maintain pricing power in the next wave of institutional influx, mastering the infrastructure chips operating under the U.S. compliance framework offers more structural return potential than merely betting on asset prices.
● From Trading to Upstream Trust Base: YZi has previously excelled in trading and research, and now by participating in BitGo's strategic allocation, it effectively layers an "upstream trust base" on top of its existing business. BitGo, as a compliant custody and settlement infrastructure, provides YZi with a solid entry point for future involvement in more institutional collaborations, derivatives design, indices, and structured products, transitioning it from a single-strategy participant to a multi-dimensional layout of "infrastructure + products + research."
● The Bargaining Significance of "Early Layer Chips": Compared to passive buying in the secondary market, participating in the IPO strategic allocation is a way of configuring "early layer" chips, reflected not only in potential costs and lock-up arrangements but also in forming direct dialogue channels with BitGo's management, underwriting syndicate, and other strategic investors. This relational network will, in turn, enhance YZi's bargaining power when negotiating with institutional clients, giving it higher leverage and profit-sharing space in joint product issuance, custody solution selection, and cross-market collaboration.
● Betting on Compliance at the Cycle Turning Point: Unregulated custody often attracts users with higher interest rates or more flexible operations, but in a period of regulatory uncertainty and frequent black swan events, its risk premium quickly amplifies. YZi's choice to lean towards compliance at this time essentially sacrifices some short-term marginal returns for long-term certainty and safety margins—especially against the backdrop of ongoing regulatory tightening in the U.S. and the global acceleration of institutions screening compliant partners, this positioning resembles a macro allocation of "standing on the right track."
Compliant Custody Taking Over Flow: The Default Entry for Global Institutions
● Gateway for Institutional Entry: BitGo currently serves over 5,100 institutions across 100 countries, and this network has become one of the "first stops" for many institutions when allocating digital assets. Whether large exchanges, regional brokerages, fund managers, or family offices, they often complete account opening, compliance review, and asset custody at compliant custodians before connecting through multiple channels to enter trading and yield scenarios, with BitGo being the most representative gateway node among them.
● Integrated Services Reshaping Capital Pathways: BitGo packages custody, staking, and issuance services, allowing funds within its system to achieve a closed loop of "custody—yield—reallocation." Once funds enter custody, they can participate in on-chain staking to earn yields within a compliant framework, with some assets circulating through structured products linked to specific assets. This integrated pathway changes the traditional role of "custody only responsible for storage," significantly enhancing the bargaining power of custodians in the yield distribution chain.
● The Game Between Exchanges, Market Makers, and Asset Managers: In this new landscape, the relationship between compliant custody platforms and exchanges, market makers, and asset managers is both cooperative and competitive. Exchanges seek to control more user funds and trading depth, while custodians emphasize safety and compliance first; market makers and asset managers rely on custody for hedging operations and fund settlement but are also evaluating whether they need to build or hold custody capabilities themselves. BitGo, with its compliant trust and multi-jurisdictional licenses, has a natural advantage in terms of influence but must continuously make concessions in enhancing liquidity connections and reducing integration costs to maintain ecological balance.
● Amplifying Global Liquidity Leverage: If more sovereign funds, pensions, and other long-term capital formally enter the market in the future, their asset allocation will almost inevitably start from compliant custody platforms. Infrastructure like BitGo will become the main bridge connecting "traditional capital pools" and "on-chain native liquidity": one end is strictly regulated custody accounts, and the other end is exchanges, DeFi protocols, and over-the-counter markets. As the scale of funds on the bridge expands, compliant custody platforms effectively amplify global digital asset liquidity, even influencing the risk pricing structures between different assets and regions.
Compliance Narrative Colliding with Decentralization: A Long-Term Tug-of-War
● Divergence of Two Technical Narratives: On one hand, participants represented by figures like CZ have long emphasized a technical path of decentralization, trustlessness, and minimal intermediaries, hoping to weaken the power of centralized platforms through self-custody and open protocols; on the other hand, BitGo represents a path of compliance and centralized custody, partially shifting trust back from "code is law" to licensed institutions and court systems, with fundamental differences in values, technical routes, and regulatory attitudes between the two narratives.
● Real-World Needs Driving "First Onshore, Then Connect": For most institutions, the current regulatory environment dictates that they must first enter an auditable and accountable "onshore" custody system, completing KYC, AML, audits, and risk control before discussing how to connect with the on-chain native ecosystem. Platforms like BitGo play the role of temporarily filling the gap between the "traditional compliant world" and the "decentralized world," allowing funds to enter in a regulatory-acceptable manner before extending to on-chain through bridging and whitelisted addresses.
● Risks of Single Point Trust and Policy Uncertainty: The model of compliant centralized custody also has obvious concerns—assets concentrated at a few nodes mean that single-point technical accidents, internal governance failures, or sudden shifts in regulatory policy can have a huge impact on existing funds. Moreover, if regulatory directions fluctuate in the coming years, strengthening scrutiny or restricting certain business types, institutions like BitGo will directly bear policy risks, while decentralized self-custody and distributed custody solutions may gain alternative roles among certain highly sensitive funds.
● Coexistence and Division of Labor in the Mid to Long-Term Landscape: A more realistic mid to long-term scenario is that compliant centralized custody and decentralized self-custody will coexist and form a division of labor: large-scale, strongly regulated institutional funds will rely more on compliant trusts and multi-jurisdictional custody networks; while individuals and institutions with higher risk tolerance and stronger technical capabilities will lean towards self-custody or hybrid custody, using decentralized protocols to construct more flexible strategy combinations. If the BitGo model can continuously find a balance between regulation and the market, it may complement rather than create a zero-sum relationship with decentralized infrastructure in the future.
From One Allocation to the Next Round of Order Reconstruction
YZi Labs' bet on BitGo is essentially a bet on one direction: first firmly grasp the upstream position of compliant infrastructure, then discuss larger-scale institutional entry and asset reconstruction stories. Under this logic, the compliant trust structure, multi-jurisdictional layout, and Wall Street listing identity together form the "base chips" for the next phase of institutional waves, rather than a simple financial investment.
BitGo's listing on the NYSE and entry into the global spotlight under the BTGO identity, combined with its multi-jurisdictional layout in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, provides a sample of "legitimization" for the entire digital asset ecosystem: digital asset custody is no longer a technical service in a gray area but a financial infrastructure that can be discussed and priced under the strictest regulations and the most traditional market rules. For the global ecosystem, this is a key link in the process of moving from the margins to the mainstream narrative.
Of course, this narrative is still full of uncertainties: the market performance after BitGo's IPO, the future direction of regulatory evolution, and any potential custody security incidents will reshape the market's pricing of the "compliant centralized custody" model. If regulations tighten beyond expectations, compliance costs and business boundaries may be redefined; once an extreme security incident occurs, the entire logic of "compliance equals safety" will also be questioned.
For readers, it is more important to build a set of their own thinking framework: on the infrastructure side, identifying which compliant custody, settlement, and clearing nodes are gradually becoming essential channels for global capital flow; on the asset side, assessing which strategies, tokens, or rights will directly benefit from or be indirectly constrained by this compliance mainline. When allocating, it is necessary to not only focus on the opportunities brought by the infrastructure but also to leave room for risk hedging against regulatory fluctuations, technological centralization, and single-point failures—during the phase when the new custody order has not yet fully formed, whether it is possible to achieve a dynamic balance in the dual dimensions of "infrastructure + assets" may be the true moat in this wave.
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