jakiro
Author: Lin Wanwan, rhythmic BlockBeats
In the crypto world, the most acoustic thing is not a gong-beating transaction, but a connection that can quietly put $9 billion in pockets.
In July 2025, 80,000 bitcoin addresses that had been sleeping for 14 years suddenly shipped, which is one of the largest nominal Bitcoin transactions in history.This shift in scale should have triggered a 30% drop in the market, but the reality is – there is no big flash crash, no panic, and this batch of Bitcoin is quietly absorbed by the market.
The $9 billion bargaining chips were eaten “quietly” by the market.The operation is neither an exchange nor a hedge fund, but a somewhat unknown Wall Street player: Galaxy Digital.
In the latest second-quarter financial report performance meeting on the evening of August 5, someone asked the CEO: How did you win 80,000 BTC customers?Is there a formal tendering process?
The CEO replied lightly: “This order, relationship is more important than quotation.”
Who is behind Galaxy Digital?What kind of political and business resources have been used to take over this epic transaction?And what new power structure is being formulated for the crypto world?
Senior “Friends”: Political Capital in the Board of Directors
The key to this transaction is not a quote in front of the stage, but a connection behind the scenes – everything points to an old Wall Street man.
Founder Mike Novogratz, 56, was the standard “Made in Wall Street”.
He worked at Goldman Sachs for 11 years, starting from the Southeast Asian Futures Station and finally becoming a fixed income partner.Novogratz at that time was one of the very few people who could shuttle between macro trading, asset portfolio and national policies.
He then joined Fortress Investment Group, leading macro-strategic investment and was one of the first key figures in the group to bet on emerging markets and sovereign debt.
During that period, he frequently went to and from policy institutions in Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe, central banks and marketing departments, to negotiate bond issuance and exchange rate policies with local governments, and was familiar with the game logic between leverage and sovereignty in the “gray zone”.
Between 2012 and 2015, he became a member of the New York Fed Investment Advisory Board, directly participating in policy advisory, monetary mechanism research and financial institution evaluation.This gave him a scarce “dual ability” – understanding both derivative trading and the language and rhythm of regulatory authorities.
This is someone who has been dealing with political power, Wall Street capital and information for more than a decade.
As early as 2013, he used his own funds to invest heavily in Bitcoin and Ethereum, with a total investment of about $7 million.In 2017, he publicly stated in an interview with CNBC: “I have made more than $250 million in crypto assets over the past two years.”
But he is not an “indigenous” in the crypto industry, nor is he a typical speculator.His real turn occurred in 2015—that year, when he lost money due to a heavy holding in Brazil’s interest rate market, he left the fortress and briefly retreated from the front-tier investment field.It was also during that “window period” that he carefully examined Bitcoin for the first time and re-established his understanding of currency, credit and financial infrastructure.
But Novogratz did not stop at “holding Bitcoin” like many early crypto evangelists.His ambition is to establish a new “financial system design” that belongs to the on-chain world.”What I see is a systematic gap—the liquidity in the crypto world is getting deeper and deeper, but without structure,” he said.
In his opinion, there is almost no benchmarking in the crypto world such as asset management, market maker, clearing, ETF custody, PIPE financing, audit disclosure, and regulatory lobbying in the traditional financial world.This is an “institutional wasteland” that needs to be reconstructed urgently.
Galaxy Digital was born in this structural crack.
In 2018, Novogratz invested $350 million out of his own pocket and successfully went public through a backdoor acquisition of Canadian shell company Bradmer Pharmaceuticals, becoming the first crypto financial platform to provide full-stack services to institutions.This is a company designed as a “Wall Street version of on-chain investment banking.”
However, from the Canadian Exchange to the Nasdaq, Galaxy Digital has been on the road for a total of 1,320 days, nearly four years.During this period, the company experienced nine rounds of feedback from the SEC, countless legal reviews, and invested more than $25 million to meet compliance requirements.In the winter of regulatory oversight of the entire encryption industry being collectively blocked and frequently “going overseas”, Galaxy gritted its teeth and persevered.
It is not a trading platform or a VC, but a “financial structure service provider” in the field of encryption.Galaxy Digital was designed by him as “Wall Street version of Goldman Sachs on Chain”.Its structural design can also be seen everywhere in the imprint of his Wall Street origin:
·Service list benchmarking Goldman Sachs: covers asset management, market making, OTC trading, proprietary investment research, risk management, and financial advisors;
·Trading structure benchmarking Citadel: supports dark pool matching, low-latency derivative systems, and docking with ETF liquidity;
·Policy path benchmarking Brookings: set up a policy research team, write reports, participate in hearings, and enter the regulatory sandbox;
·The compliance path is benchmarked against Deloitte and EY: to create a “legal packaging system for digital assets” that supports financial report accounting and audit disclosure.
The core of all this is the “political and business circle of friends” established by the Galaxy board of directors.
Among the board members of Galaxy Digital is Tyler Williams, who was once the deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department, was seconded as special consultant for digital assets by the current Treasury Secretary in 2025. He can translate crypto language into regulatory language and is an important bridge for Galaxy to communicate with institutions such as SEC, CFTC, and FASB.
There is also board member Doug Deason, one of the most influential property and energy lobbyists in Texas.He has participated in the promotion of a number of legislation related to mining, electricity prices and taxes, and is the key figure behind Galaxy’s successful transformation of Bitcoin mining into an AI computing power center.
This three-line convergence structure of “policy-capital-technology” makes Galaxy have an extremely rare “policy impact capability” among crypto companies.
In this new financial structure he built, Galaxy not only does transactions and asset management, but also a “legal power-up” service provider for traditional companies to enter the on-chain world.
Compared with CZ’s ultimate operational capabilities and SBF’s aggressive funding strategy, Mike Novogratz is another type of founder.He never emphasizes “decentralization”, but rather “structural arrangements”; he never uses currency price as the only indicator, but is more concerned about whether the paths of privacy, supervision, systems, finance, custody, and compliance are truly opened.
This also explains why, although Galaxy is not the strongest in traffic, in that silent transaction of 80,000 Bitcoins, it became the only player who can win large orders, complete liquidation, and give the opponent peace of mind.
Many people think that Galaxy Digital’s moat is capital, but its real advantage is its sense of politics and business.
The banker behind the crypto treasury
80,000 Bitcoins are just a corner of this relationship network. Companies represented by Chinese richest man CZ have also begun to regard Galaxy Digital as a “political passport” to compliance.
In mid-2025, a new mainstream narrative of the US stock market quietly emerged: cryptocurrency stocks.The US stock market is staged a capital “shell exchange technique”: putting BTC and ETH into listed companies, allowing crypto assets to land on Wall Street in the name of financial reports.
But just before the end of 2023, this is still regarded as a “forbidden zone” in the capital market.
It is actually difficult for American companies to “legally hold currency” because the financial system cannot handle it.According to the FASB accounting standards at the time, crypto assets such as Bitcoin could only be recorded as “intangible assets” – if the currency price fell, it would be impaired, but it would not be calculated if it rose, which led to serious distortion of the company’s financial report and difficulty in passing the audit.
For example, if you buy 10,000 ETH, you should immediately record the loss when it falls, but if it rises, you should pretend that it is not visible and cannot be counted as profit.This makes the company’s financial report ugly and makes the audit mess.
The new FASB regulations were not until the 2025 fiscal year, when the currency rose, the profits were calculated, and the channel for “coin holding compliance” was truly opened.
Galaxy is the first service provider to enter and bring a group of listed companies to “legally enter”.
The first to smell the opportunity was a group of ancient giant whales with ETH.They quietly packed their ETH into the US stock shell company, and used the left hand to turn their right hand to complete disguised cash out without disturbing the market.SharpLink Gaming is the leader in this “cash-out technique”.
Soon, the richest Chinese man CZ also followed up – stuffing his own company’s platform currency BNB into US stock companies, backdoor, packaging, and listing, turning the platform currency into compliant assets, and then entering the capital valuation system.
And behind this series of operations, Galaxy Digital has quietly surfaced – it is the trading consultant for the entire script.
It tailors the “crypto-treasury” narrative plan for these companies: from OTC position building, asset custody, to compliance disclosure, and pledge income, every step cannot avoid the political and business channels it builds, and every step is accurately stepping on the gray area between regulatory blind spots and capital leverage.
Galaxy Digital’s core business has three directions: OTC transaction + custody + strategic consultant.
It not only has the top crypto OTC trading capabilities in the United States, but also can complete bulk matching and risk hedging for customers during fluctuations; it also provides compliant asset management services such as ETF custody, pledge, and tax filing, and manages billions of dollars in digital assets; it participates more deeply in the strategic planning of enterprise-level customers, from PIPE financing to asset classification, financial accounting, and disclosure paths, and even collaborative investment with its own funds to help traditional companies transform into “crypto treasury”.
Take SharpLink Gaming, the leading company in ETH treasury, as an example.The company bought ETH through Galaxy Bulk OTC and signed an asset management agreement with it.Host part of the ETH purchased by the company on Galaxy, and under the guidance of Galaxy, the full process from financing to disclosure is designed.It provides customers with a complete set of “on-chain financial structures” such as PIPE structure, coin stake classification, and custody certificates, helping companies achieve both hidden and compliant position building.
According to the SEC disclosure, Galaxy and ParaFi Capital charge a grading management fee of 0.25%-1.25% per year, with a minimum of US$1.25 million.As SharpLink’s coin holdings expand, Galaxy will receive stable long-term revenue.
This is no longer a single transaction, but a “on-chain treasury business” with clear structure and stable returns.In the institutionalized path of crypto finance, Galaxy is becoming an entrance for companies that want to legally “hold coins to account”.
This template is not a set of table copying, but a complete set of paths:
·First, help you buy coins in a hidden but compliant way: provide OTC channels and complete them in conjunction with PIPE investment structure, targeted allocation and warrant plans.
·Second, teach you how to “install crypto assets into financial reports”: How to let the auditor confirm that these coins really exist?
·Third, solve the American political channels for you: how to disclose the compliance path of US stocks, and solve it in one-stop.Galaxy has participated in almost every key move as traditional companies transform into crypto treasury.
CEO Novogratz said on the Q2 call: “Almost all traditional Wall Street institutions are preparing for a brand new financial structure – assets move from accounts to wallets, funds and stocks begin to tokenize, and stablecoins become mainstream payment carriers.”
What Galaxy does is to change these systems from “concept” to “reports”.
For many listed companies, choosing Galaxy Digital is not only about choosing a crypto service provider, but more like choosing a channel with a “political legal identity”.
The power structure of the crypto industry is reshuffled
In 2025, the crypto industry seems to be ushering in a spring of regularization: ETF approval, stablecoin legislation, and corporate currency holdings are all moving closer to traditional finance.
But in this round of “compliance” torrent, the real winner is not the indigenous people who have called for ten years of decentralization, but a small group of political and business shuttlers who are well versed in the language of the system and master the rhythm of policies.
From the currency circle to Wall Street, from wallet to financial reports, the path of crypto assets is compliance on the surface, but the bottom layer is a typical institutional arbitrage – who canWhoever builds a bridge between supervision and capital has the right to pricing.
During the Q2 earnings call in 2025, an analyst asked: “How do you view the development opportunities of stablecoins and asset tokenization?”
Novogratz’s answer hardly involves products, but a seemingly simple but highly institutional judgment: “Assets are moving, accounts are moving towards wallets, and the compliance path will become the core competitiveness.” It was also this quarter that Galaxy Digital began to turn losses into profits.
Galaxy Digital is the secret intermediary in this transfer of power.It does not issue coins or talks about narratives, but is proficient in structural design, and includes on-chain assets into every link of PIPE financing, ETF custody, and audit disclosure, and uses a complete set of compliance grammar to make new finance legally land.
It sells not services, but structure; it earns not market money, but the seams of compliance.
This is the real power structure of the crypto industry: when the market prices, agreements and narratives at the surface are one after another, the institutional structure at the bottom has long been firmly controlled by a few people.
More and more crypto projects and traditional companies are completing “political entry” through it.And what is really fed behind is not the developers or investors, but the people who have dual language skills and can switch freely between encryption, traditional finance and power.
When compliance becomes a scarce resource, a new hierarchical order is quietly taking shape: the times no longer reward those who run fast, and those who power returns to the rules.
