Mike Belshe, Co-Founder & CEO, BitGo

Episode 63 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block's Frank Chaparro and BitGo co-founder & CEO Mike Belshe.

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Mike Belshe, co-founder and CEO of BitGo, returned to The Scoop, The Block's podcast hosted by Frank Chaparro, for a July 2023 conversation reflecting on how the prior year's crypto meltdown had exposed the industry's continued immaturity.

In this episode, Belshe shares his thoughts on last year's collapse of the crypto credit market and explains what it will take to restore confidence in the sector.

Outline:

0:52 - Market musings

3:12 - Crypto conspiracies

5:54 - Business at BitGo

8:39 - Crypto prime brokerage

14:24 - Lending market cooldown

15:55 - Crypto’s opaque transparency

21:22 - Crypto market recovery

32:47 - BitGo x Galaxy Digital

Belshe, a veteran Silicon Valley engineer who previously worked on Chrome and SPDY at Google before co-founding BitGo in 2013, has built the company into one of the largest digital asset custody and security providers, serving institutional clients, exchanges, and, increasingly, prime brokerage customers seeking regulated infrastructure for trading and lending.

On the episode, Belshe discussed how the collapse of major lenders and exchanges throughout 2022, including the unwinding of BitGo's own planned acquisition by Galaxy Digital, underscored just how much of the crypto credit market had been built on opacity rather than the transparency the industry often claims to champion. He argued that rebuilding lender and counterparty confidence would require far more rigorous proof-of-reserves practices, clearer segregation of client assets, and custody solutions designed from the outset to prevent rehypothecation, rather than bolted-on fixes after the fact. Belshe also detailed how BitGo's business had evolved to include prime brokerage services, allowing clients to trade across venues while keeping assets secured in qualified custody, a model he framed as central to preventing the kind of counterparty blowups that defined the FTX and Celsius collapses.

The conversation touched on the practical mechanics of institutional custody, the regulatory scrutiny facing custodians in the United States, and why Belshe believed the shakeout of weaker players in 2022 would ultimately strengthen the case for infrastructure built around security and compliance rather than yield chasing.

Throughout, Belshe positioned BitGo as a company built for exactly this kind of moment, having spent a decade focused on multi-signature security and custody long before institutional adoption became a dominant industry narrative, and he offered his outlook on what a more mature, better-regulated digital asset market might look like coming out of the downturn.