BitGo wants to make one thing very clear. The client assets it holds are not BitGo’s to play with.
Chief Product Officer Eugene Hahr has reaffirmed that the company operates strictly as a custodian. BitGo cannot touch or redeploy client assets without explicit permission.
The timing matters. BitGo is pushing into prime brokerage, staking and tokenized assets. Each new business line raises a familiar question from institutional clients: where does my money actually sit, and who can move it?
What BitGo is actually promising
The commitment is written into BitGo’s custodial services agreements, not just into marketing copy. Those contracts say BitGo cannot access or deploy client assets without direct authorization from the client.
The ownership structure follows the same logic. Clients keep full ownership of their assets at all times. No transfer of ownership happens when funds are placed in BitGo’s custody.
BitGo also says assets are held on a strict 1:1 basis. There is no rehypothecation.
Rehypothecation is a mouthful, so a quick translation. It means a custodian takes assets a client has pledged or deposited and reuses them for its own purposes, such as lending them out or posting them as collateral elsewhere. BitGo is saying that does not happen with client funds. One coin deposited means one coin held.
Client assets are kept in segregated accounts. That means they are not pooled together with the company’s own balance sheet.
On top of that, BitGo says it carries up to $250 million in insurance coverage from Lloyd’s of London. That figure is a ceiling on coverage, not a guarantee that every possible loss would be made whole.
The tech behind the paperwork
Contracts are only as good as the systems enforcing them. BitGo leans on two technologies to back up its promise: multi-signature wallets and multi-party computation, usually shortened to MPC.
Multi-signature is the crypto version of a joint bank account that needs more than one signature on every check. A transaction only goes through when several separate keys approve it. No single party can push funds out the door alone.
MPC reaches a similar outcome by a different route. Instead of several full keys, one key is mathematically split into pieces held by different parties. The pieces cooperate to sign a transaction without the full key ever existing in one place.
Both setups restrict unilateral transaction authorization, according to BitGo. Put simply, the company has designed its systems so that it cannot quietly move client funds on its own, even if someone inside wanted to.
Why custody is getting more attention now
BitGo is no longer just a vault. The company has expanded into prime brokerage and stablecoin services, and it is building out staking and tokenized asset offerings.
BitGo says it serves thousands of institutional clients. Its banking arm, BitGo Bank & Trust, NA, is a federally chartered institution overseen by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC. The OCC is the US regulator that charters and supervises national banks.
Hahr has also argued that strong custody infrastructure is essential for scaling tokenized equities in markets that run 24/7. Traditional stock exchanges close at night and on weekends. Crypto markets never do. If tokenized stocks trade around the clock, the plumbing holding them has to work around the clock too.
What this means for institutions and the custody race
For institutional clients, the message is about control. Funds remain theirs, stay segregated, and cannot be redeployed without their sign-off.
The more interesting tension is commercial. Prime brokerage and staking are typically where custodians find extra revenue, and in some business models that revenue comes from putting client assets to work. BitGo is effectively saying it will grow into those areas without crossing the line from custodian to user of client funds. Clients can opt in to activities like staking, but the default is that nothing moves without them.
Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.