blockworks.co
Bitcoin-focused NYDIG has made headlines in the past few months for its partnerships with organizations ranging from the NBA’s Houston Rockets to banks and credit unions. But these announcements are just the beginning, the company’s CMO Kelly Brewster told Blockworks in an interview.
“Over the course of the next year, we plan to bring bitcoin to [hundreds, if not thousands], of banks around the country and the first banks are coming online right now,” Brewster said, adding that the current demand, from companies looking to integrate Bitcoin, is unlike anything he’s ever seen before in this space.
NYDIG began in 2016 and spun off into a separate entity in 2017 with a mission to “make Bitcoin accessible to all” by providing technology and financial services solutions to banks, FinTech companies, investment managers, and institutions, among others. It is also a subsidiary of holding company Stone Ridge, a $12 billion alternative asset manager.
NYDIG is well known for partnering with traditional financial companies to expand bitcoin’s reach. Last month, it partnered with Q2 Holdings, a provider of digital solutions for banking and lending, to give banks and credit unions a platform to buy, sell and hold bitcoin. In September, it also joined forces with MVB Bank and Victor Technologies to integrate Bitcoin into MVB’s Banking-as-a-service (BaaS) solutions, Blockworks previously reported.
“We’ve been doing this for a little while and a lot of the things that have happened over the past year are things we expected would happen at some point and we built a business that could have the longevity to be able to help usher those things into existence,” Brewster said.
“But I didn’t think that a lot of the things that we’ve been seeing, in terms of banks getting involved in Bitcoin and main street retail companies getting involved in bitcoin, I didn’t think a lot of those things would happen for quite some time. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much has happened to me here at the end of 2021,” he added.
Looking back, Brewster said he would have never guessed the crypto market would accelerate this quickly. “Things that have moved very quickly, were things I would not have expected a couple of years ago,” like layer-2 technologies growing or banks adopting bitcoin, which Brewster said he expected would take longer to transpire.
In the past year, the company has had hundreds of conversations with companies about integrating Bitcoin, with many of those companies being banks, Brewster noted. While he doesn’t have an exact number for how many businesses NYDIG partnered with in 2021, he estimates it was “hundreds,” with at least a dozen announced so far.
Although there are banks that have partnered with NYDIG already to provide bitcoin to clients, the firm will continue to roll out to the market in a “major way” by next year, Brewster said. “I think I would just like to see more of the same [next year] — like I think a lot of the seeds that have been planted this year are really starting to bear fruit,” he added.
There’s a big opportunity and a big challenge ahead to make sure the population who has not yet bought bitcoin or is not involved knows that these options are available to them, Brewster commented. “That’s really the next big step in terms of bitcoin adoption,” he said.