BitGo and the Illusion of Crypto Legitimacy

BitGo priced at $18, opened at $22.43, and by close had settled into the $20 range. The headline was clean: 2026's first crypto IPO. The subtext was murkier.

This is what institutional acceptance looks like when it's still partially performance art.

The numbers tell a story that traders find comforting. BitGo pulled in $212.8 million. It's profitable—genuinely, measurably profitable, having posted $35.3 million in net income in the first nine months of 2025. It holds $104 billion in assets under management. Its subscription and services revenue grew 56% year-over-year. These are not tokens pretending to have utility. This is a custody and prime brokerage business with actual economics.

And yet.

The arc of this IPO reveals something about where the crypto industry sits right now, which is different from where it wishes to be seen. BitGo didn't go public at the apex of the bull market when Bitcoin was making new highs and retail investors were rewriting their retirement plans. It went public now, after Bitcoin fell 6.4% in 2025—its first annual loss since 2022. After the October crash. After Gemini and Circle, both of which listed in 2025 near all-time highs, have since been hammered. After the crypto IPO window was supposed to shut permanently.

Instead, BitGo opened at a 24.6% premium to its IPO price. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup underwriting it. Institutions bid. It worked.

But here's what should trouble you about this narrative of "legitimacy": BitGo succeeded because it does not behave like a crypto company. It succeeded because it's a custody firm that happens to serve the crypto industry. It markets itself explicitly as infrastructure, not a token play. Its balance sheet holds Bitcoin, but that's a sideline. Its core thesis is that institutions want security, regulatory clarity, and predictable cash flows—none of which are intrinsic to cryptocurrencies themselves.

This is the opposite of the promises made in 2017. It's not decentralization. It's not peer-to-peer. It's not the elimination of intermediaries. It's the formalization of intermediation.

The irony sharpens when you consider the backdrop. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon was sued by Trump for alleged debanking—a direct attack on financial gatekeeping. Meanwhile, the way BitGo succeeds as a public company is by being a gate, certified and approved by central authorities. Regulated. Chartered. Legitimate.

The question is whether that actually signals health in the crypto market or just a narrowing of what can survive in it. Grayscale and Kraken are next in line for IPOs. Both are infrastructure plays. Both appeal to the same institutional demand for custody, staking, and professional services. All the companies that went public in the crypto boom—Bullish, Circle, eToro, Figure, Gemini—were caught in the downturn. Their share prices have tanked. They built on the assumption that the bull market would continue funding their growth. It didn't.

BitGo, which has been around since 2013, made different bets. It built a balance sheet. It generated actual profits. It waited. And when the window cracked open, it had something to show that wasn't a whitepaper or a thesis about the future.

This is what maturation looks like in a volatile asset class. Not the reckless expansion that defined 2021–2023, but the patient accumulation of institutional customers, regulatory compliance, and predictable revenue streams.

It's also what makes crypto smaller.

The thesis that crypto would replace finance got replaced by the thesis that crypto would coexist with finance. Then it became the thesis that crypto would be a niche service within finance, managed by custody firms and compliance-heavy platforms. Each refinement is a step backward for the original vision. Each step backward is a step forward for the stock price.

By the time BitGo trades in the $25–$30 range—and analysts think it will—it will be a "superior asset," as VanEck's Matthew Sigel put it, because it generates earnings. Because it holds actual reserves. Because it can be modeled like a financial services company. Because it has ceased to be a bet on whether crypto will overthrow the current system and become a play on whether crypto will be absorbed by it.

That's not failure. But it's not what anyone was selling in 2013 either.

The broader market shrugged at BitGo and refocused on what it cares about right now: will the Fed cut rates next week? Why did Energy hit all-time highs? Why did Netflix's narrow beat send its shares down 4% after-hours? Why is Nvidia CEO planning a China trip while Broadcom fears margin compression?

The crypto IPO window reopening is meaningful. It signals liquidity. It shows institutional appetite for "quality" digital assets. But it also signals the end of a particular kind of risk-taking. Crypto used to be about the chance that everything changes. Now it's about the probability that some things improve, modestly, over time, within a system that remains fundamentally intact.

BitGo will perform well. It will be a respectable stock. It will reward patient holders.

It will also represent the moment the revolution became a business line.