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Billionaire Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital Holdings reported unrealized gains of about $400 million from the appreciation on crypto assets in the fourth quarter so far. In the third quarter, Galaxy posted $517 million in net comprehensive income, which includes the appreciation of coin prices and $1.2 billion year-to-date through Sept. 30 “on the back of our strong operational and investing portfolio growth.” Areas like decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) added to the firm revenues, said Galaxy. The company deployed $62 million into 22 different NFT-related companies through direct investments and through Galaxy Interactive Fund strategies and also purchased two NFTs from prominent collections. During the third quarter, the company held $555.2 million of Bitcoin and $261.4 million of Ether. As of Oct. 31st, Galaxy was managing about $3.2 billion in assets. Also involved in Bitcoin mining, Galaxy hopes to capture 1% of the total hash rate or mining power. During the Q3 earnings call, Novogratz said it wouldn’t surprise him to see a “pretty sharp move” in Bitcoin, Ether, and other cryptocurrencies by year-end and expects a correction at some point in the first quarter of next year. The New York-based crypto asset manager is also expected to be listed on a US exchange in the first quarter of next year, later than initially estimated. It hopes to become a US public company in the fourth quarter. Back in 2018, it had a reverse takeover of an inactive firm so that it could trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
BitGo Assets 4x in Less Than A Year
In a statement on Monday, Galaxy Digital said it would close the purchase of crypto custodian BitGo in the first three months of next year. “We look forward to our U.S. listing and the close of our BitGo acquisition, which we now expect will occur in the first quarter of 2022,” said Novogratz in a statement. BitGo also reported its assets under custody swelling to more than $64 billion, up from $16 billion in December 2020. In comparison, earlier this year, Coinbase reported $223 billion worth of assets on its platform. This surge in assets was attributed by BitGo to growing institutional interest in the space. It also reported over 500 clients and that BitGo accounts for 20% of all on-chain Bitcoin transactions by value. “Institutional custody is not the same as retail custody,” Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, said in a statement. “BitGo Trust Company was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of institutional investors.” BitGo also appointed Cassandra Lentchner as President, who joined the company as Chief Operating Officer in May 2021. She oversaw compliance and regulatory standards for New York’s controversial BitLicense and cybersecurity policy when serving as Deputy Superintendent of Compliance for the New York Department of Finance Services (NYDFS).