BitGo (BTGO) reported the fastest revenue growth of its short public life on 12 Aug. The number is a symptom rather than an achievement, and understanding why explains more about the company than any line in the release.
BitGo's Revenue Grows Fastest When Its Business Gets Worse
13 August 2026 - 14:15 UTC
By Stu Clelland
Total revenue was $4.33bn for the three months to 30 Jun, up 80% year-to-year. Direct costs were $4,29bn. What BitGo actually kept was $43mn. The gap is not a rounding artefact or an unusual quarter. It is how the business is built, and the quarter in which the gap widened most is the quarter the headline number looked best.
The mechanics of a gross revenue line
Almost all the reported figure comes from digital asset sales, which is BitGo buying and selling crypto as principal for clients. Spot trades are booked gross, meaning the entire value of the asset sold passes through the revenue line, with the purchase cost recorded separately. Derivatives are booked net, meaning only BitGo's margin appears. The accounting is standard and disclosed. The consequence is not intuitive.
In the second quarter, that line produced $4.2bn of revenue against $4,19bnn of cost. BitGo kept $7.1mn, a margin of 17 basis points, or 17 hundredths of one per cent of the value traded. In the first quarter it was 32bps. A year earlier, 19bps.
On Wednesday's analyst call, outgoing CFO Ed Reginelli attributed the fall to a mix. Derivatives notional volume dropped to roughly $1bn from close to $3bn, while spot trading grew. Because spot is the gross-booked product and derivatives the net-booked one, shifting business from the second to the first inflates reported revenue and deflates margin simultaneously. The 80% growth and the halved margin are the same event described twice.
Reginelli said he expects margins back in a 20 to 25bps range. That is a forecast, not a result, and BitGo did not disclose July or August volumes to support it.
Where the money is actually coming from
Strip the pass-through and the company looks different. Of that $43mn, subscriptions and services contributed $28mn, roughly 65%. That is the custody and wallet franchise, which carries no direct cost, and it grew 8.5% year-to-year. The $4.2bn trading operation only contributed $7mn, or 17%.
Staking contributed $3.9mn. Revenue of $65mn was up 31% sequentially, but the take rate, the share of staking rewards BitGo retains, fell to 6% from 16% in the first quarter and 10% a year earlier. Management attributed this to a single large institutional client staking Ether (ETH) at a discounted contractual rate. More volume at a materially worse price is a description of eroding pricing power, no matter what it does to the revenue line.
Stablecoin-as-a-Service is presented as the growth story, and revenue did rise 148% year-to-year to $39mn. Sponsor fees paid to the issuers whose reserves BitGo holds were $36mn. BitGo kept $3.1mn. The company labels the sponsor fee ratio a take rate and reports it rising to 8% from 2.6% a year ago, which is accurate, but describes money going out rather than money retained.
In short: the business that grew 8.5% is the one paying for everything, while the businesses growing 148% and 84% are only contributing about a quarter of net revenue between them.
Why the CFO's exit matters more now
Net loss was $19mn against net income of $38mn a year earlier. Loss per share was $0.16. Adjusted EBITDA was a $4.2mn loss. For the half, the loss is $80mn and operations consumed $36mn of cash. Against that, the board authorized a $50mn buyback in June with $159mn of cash on hand, and bought nothing in the quarter.
A company whose numbers need this much translation depends on the credibility of the people doing the translating. Management concluded that disclosure controls were "not effective" as of 30 Jun, with material weaknesses in IT access controls, segregation of duties and accounting headcount unremedied since before the IPO. Two days before the results, CFO Ed Reginelli told the board he intended to resign as CFO and principal accounting officer, effective 15 Sep, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The release described a transition rather than a resignation, however. BitGo also faces a securities class action over its IPO disclosures and awaits a Delaware ruling on its damages claim against Galaxy Digital (GLXY).
The reported KPIs carry the same translation problem. Assets on the platform fell 28% year-to-year to $65bn. BitGo led its highlights with a normalized version showing a 31% rise, and disclosed in a footnote that it changed the normalization method this quarter, from quarter-average to current-quarter-median prices.
BitGo published after 12 Aug's close. Shares, which had fallen 5.1% during the session to $4.72, recovered to about $4.95 in thin after-hours trade, and stood near $4.85 on the morning of 13 Aug, roughly 73% below the $18 January IPO price. The market is not paying for the $4.3bn. It is paying, sceptically, for the $43mn, and for a workforce 15% smaller than in May.
