Who guided the Chinese billionaire CZ to go public?

Author: Lin Wanwan, Rhythm BlockBeats

In the world of cryptocurrency, the loudest noise isn't made by the clanging of gongs and drums during trades, but by the connections that allow one to quietly pocket 9 billion dollars.

In July 2025, 80,000 bitcoins that had been dormant for 14 years were suddenly moved, marking one of the largest nominal bitcoin transactions in history. Such a large transfer should have triggered a 30% drop in the market, but the reality is - there was no significant crash, no panic; this batch of bitcoins was quietly absorbed by the market.

$9 billion in chips was "silently" consumed by the market. The operator is neither an exchange nor a hedge fund, but rather a somewhat obscure Wall Street player: Galaxy Digital.

During the latest Q2 earnings conference on the evening of August 5, someone asked the CEO: How did you secure 80,000 BTC from the client? Is there a formal bidding process?

The CEO replied nonchalantly, "This order is more important than the price."

Who is actually behind Galaxy Digital? What kind of political and business resources were utilized to secure this epic deal? And what kind of new power structure is this web of relationships creating for the crypto world?

High-level "Circle of Friends": Political Capital in the Boardroom

The key to this transaction does not lie in the quotes presented on stage, but in the connections behind the scenes – everything points to an old Wall Street figure.

The 56-year-old founder Mike Novogratz is a standard example of "Wall Street manufacturing."

He worked at Goldman Sachs for 11 years, starting from the Southeast Asia futures desk and eventually becoming a fixed income partner. At that time, Novogratz was one of the few who could navigate the intersections of macro trading, asset allocation, and national policy.

He then joined Fortress Investment Group, leading macro strategy investments and was one of the key figures in the group to bet on emerging markets and sovereign debt.

During that period, he frequently visited policy institutions, central banks, and market departments in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, negotiating bond issuance and exchange rate policies with local governments, becoming familiar with the game logic between leverage and sovereignty in the "gray area."

From 2012 to 2015, he became a member of the New York Fed's Investment Advisory Committee, directly participating in policy consulting, monetary mechanism research, and financial institution evaluation. This endowed him with the rare "dual capability" — understanding both derivatives trading and the language and rhythm of regulatory bodies.

This is a person who has been dealing with the intersection of political power, Wall Street capital, and information for over a decade.

He invested heavily in Bitcoin and Ethereum with his own funds as early as 2013, with a total investment of around 7 million dollars. By 2017, he publicly stated in an interview with CNBC: "In the past two years, I have earned over 250 million dollars from crypto assets."

But he is neither a "native" of the cryptocurrency industry nor a typical speculator. His real turning point occurred in 2015—when he suffered losses in the Brazilian interest rate market due to heavy investment, retreating from the fortress and briefly stepping back from the frontline of investment. It was also during that "window period" that he first seriously examined Bitcoin and reestablished his understanding of currency, credit, and financial infrastructure.

But Novogratz did not stop at "holding Bitcoin" like many early crypto evangelists. His ambition is to establish a new "financial system design" that belongs to the on-chain world. He said, "What I see is a systemic gap — the liquidity in the crypto world is getting deeper, but there is no structure."

In his view, the entire chain of asset management, market making, clearing, ETF custody, PIPE financing, audit disclosure, regulatory lobbying, etc. in the traditional financial world has almost no counterparts in the crypto world. This is a "systemic wasteland" that urgently needs to be restructured.

Galaxy Digital was born in this structural gap.

In 2018, Novogratz invested $350 million out of his own pocket and successfully went public through a reverse merger with the Canadian shell company Bradmer Pharmaceuticals, becoming the first full-stack crypto financial platform aimed at institutional clients. This is a company designed to be the "Wall Street version of an on-chain investment bank."

However, it took Galaxy Digital a total of 1,320 days, nearly four years, to move from a Canadian exchange to Nasdaq. During this period, the company underwent nine rounds of feedback from the SEC, countless legal reviews, and invested over $25 million to meet compliance requirements. Amid a regulatory winter where the entire cryptocurrency industry faced obstacles and frequently "went abroad," Galaxy persevered.

It is not a trading platform, nor is it a VC, but a "financial architecture service provider" in the crypto space. Galaxy Digital is designed by him to be the "on-chain Goldman Sachs of Wall Street." Its structural design bears the imprint of his Wall Street background in every detail:

· Service list benchmarking Goldman Sachs: covering asset management, market making, OTC trading, proprietary research, risk management, financial advisory;

· Trading structure benchmarked against Citadel: supports dark pool matching, low latency derivatives system, and ETF liquidity integration;

· Policy Path Benchmarking Brookings: Establish a policy research team, write reports, participate in hearings, enter the regulatory sandbox;

· The compliance path is benchmarked against Deloitte and EY: to create a "digital asset legal packaging system" that supports financial statement entry and audit disclosures.

At the core of all this is the "political-business circle" established by the Galaxy board.

Among the board members of Galaxy Digital is Tyler Williams, who previously served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. In 2025, he was seconded by the current Treasury Secretary as a special advisor on digital assets—he can translate crypto language into regulatory language, making him an important bridge for Galaxy's communication with institutions such as the SEC, CFTC, and FASB.

There is also board member Doug Deason, one of the most influential real estate and energy lobbyists in Texas. He has been involved in promoting several legislations related to mines, electricity prices, and taxes, and is a key figure behind Galaxy's successful conversion of a Bitcoin mining facility into an AI computing center.

This structure of the "policy-capital-technology" convergence enables Galaxy to possess a "policy influence capability" that is extremely rare among cryptocurrency companies.

In the new financial structure he has built, Galaxy is not just engaged in trading and asset management, but also serves as a "legitimate on-ramp" for traditional companies entering the on-chain world.

Compared to CZ's extreme operational capabilities and SBF's aggressive funding strategies, Mike Novogratz represents a different type of founder. He never emphasizes "decentralization," but instead focuses on "structural arrangements"; he has also never used the price of cryptocurrencies as the sole indicator, but pays more attention to whether privacy, regulation, systems, finance, custody, and compliance pathways are truly connected.

This also explains why Galaxy, although not the strongest in terms of traffic, became the only player able to take down large orders, complete settlements, and reassure counterparties during that quiet transaction of 80,000 bitcoins.

Many people think that Galaxy Digital's moat is funding, but the real advantage is its political and business sensibility.

Bankers Behind the Crypto Treasury

80,000 bitcoins are just a corner of this network, with the Chinese billionaire CZ representing companies that are starting to see Galaxy Digital as a "political passport" to compliance.

In mid-2025, a new mainstream narrative in the US stock market quietly emerged: cryptocurrency stocks. The US stock market is staging a capital "shell game": putting BTC and ETH into listed companies, allowing crypto assets to debut on Wall Street under the guise of financial reports.

But before the end of 2023, this was still regarded as a "forbidden zone" in the capital market.

It is actually very difficult for American companies to "legally hold cryptocurrencies" because the financial system cannot accommodate it. According to the FASB accounting standards at the time, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could only be recorded as "intangible assets"—if the price of the coin drops, it must be impaired, but if it rises, it cannot be counted as income, resulting in a serious distortion of the company's financial statements, making audits difficult to pass.

For example, if you bought 10,000 ETH, you would need to immediately record a loss if the price drops, but if it rises, you act as if you didn't see it and cannot count it as profit. This makes the company's financial reports look terrible and causes the auditing process to be a mess.

FASB's new regulations will adopt "fair value" accounting starting from the 2025 fiscal year, and the increase in currency will be considered as income, which truly opens the channel for "compliance with holding cryptocurrencies."

Galaxy is one of the earliest service providers to enter the market and bring a group of listed companies to "legally participate."

The earliest to sniff out the opportunity were a group of ancient ETH whales. They quietly packaged their ETH into a shell company in the US stock market, using a method of passing from one hand to the other, completing a disguised cash-out with the liquidity of the US stock market without alarming the market. SharpLink Gaming is the leader in this "cash-out technique."

Soon, the Chinese billionaire CZ also followed suit—stuffing his company's platform token BNB into a US stock company, using a shell, packaging, and listing it, turning the platform token into a compliant asset, and then entering the capital valuation system.

Behind this series of operations, Galaxy Digital has quietly emerged - it is the consultant orchestrating the entire script.

It customizes the "crypto treasury" narrative solutions for these companies: from OTC build-up, asset custody, to compliance disclosure and staking returns, every step is inseparable from the political and business channel it has built, and each step precisely treads the gray area between regulatory blind spots and capital leverage.

Galaxy Digital's core business has three directions: OTC trading + custody + strategic consulting.

It has top-tier crypto OTC trading capabilities in the U.S., able to complete large-scale matching and risk hedging for clients amid volatility; it also offers compliance asset management services such as ETF custody, staking, and tax reporting, managing tens of billions of dollars in digital assets; it is more deeply involved in the strategic planning of enterprise-level clients, from PIPE financing to asset classification, financial accounting, disclosure paths, and even co-investing with its own funds to help traditional companies transform into "crypto treasuries."

Taking SharpLink Gaming, a leading company in the ETH treasury sector, as an example. This company purchased ETH through Galaxy's large OTC trades and signed an asset management agreement with them. A portion of the ETH purchased by the company is custodied at Galaxy, and under Galaxy's guidance, they design the entire process from financing to disclosure. They provide clients with a complete set of "on-chain financial structures" such as PIPE structures, coin warehouse classification, and custody proofs, helping enterprises achieve covert yet compliant position building.

According to SEC disclosures, Galaxy and ParaFi Capital charge a tiered management fee of 0.25% - 1.25% per year, with a minimum of 1.25 million dollars. As SharpLink increases its holdings, Galaxy will gain a stable long-term income.

This is no longer a single transaction, but a clearly structured and stable income "on-chain treasury business". In the institutional path of crypto finance, Galaxy is becoming an unavoidable entry point for companies that want to legally "hold and account for assets."

This template is not a mere copy-paste format, but a complete set of pathways:

· First, help you buy cryptocurrencies discreetly but in compliance: providing OTC channels, in conjunction with PIPE investment structures, directed placements, and warrant plans.

· Second, teach you how to "put" cryptocurrency assets into financial reports: how to get auditors to confirm that these coins really exist?

· Third, solving the U.S. political channel for you: the compliance path for U.S. stocks, how to disclose, a one-stop solution. In the process of traditional companies transforming into crypto treasuries, Galaxy has participated in almost every key action.

CEO Novogratz said in the Q2 conference call: "Almost all traditional institutions on Wall Street are preparing for a completely new financial architecture - assets moving from accounts to wallets, funds and stocks starting to be tokenized, and stablecoins becoming the mainstream payment medium."

What Galaxy has done is to transform these institutional changes from "concept" to "report".

For many listed companies, choosing Galaxy Digital is not just about selecting a cryptocurrency service provider; it feels more like choosing a channel that has a "politically legitimate identity."

The Power Structure of the Cryptocurrency Industry is Being Reshuffled

In 2025, the crypto industry seems to be迎来了正规化的春天: ETF approvals, stablecoin legislation, and corporate holding of cryptocurrencies are all moving closer to traditional finance.

But in this wave of "compliance," the real winners are not the indigenous people who have been shouting for decentralization for ten years, but a small group of political and business intermediaries who are well-versed in institutional language and master the rhythm of policies.

From the crypto world to Wall Street, from wallets to financial reports, the path of crypto assets appears to be compliant on the surface, but underneath it is a typical case of institutional arbitrage—whoever can build a bridge between regulation and capital holds the pricing power.

During the Q2 2025 earnings call, an analyst asked: "What are your views on the development opportunities of stablecoins and asset tokenization?"

Novogratz's response hardly touched on products, but rather a seemingly simple yet profoundly institutional judgment: "Assets are migrating, accounts are going to wallets, and compliance pathways will become core competitiveness." It is also in this quarter that Galaxy Digital began to turn a profit.

Galaxy Digital is the hidden intermediary in this power shift. It does not issue tokens or tell stories, but it excels in structural design, packaging on-chain assets into every link of PIPE financing, ETF custody, and audit disclosure, using a complete set of compliance language to bring new finance legally ashore.

It is not selling services, but structure; it is not earning money from the market, but from the loopholes in the compliance system.

This is the true power structure of the cryptocurrency industry: while the surface market prices, protocols, and narratives fluctuate, the underlying institutional framework has long been firmly controlled by a few.

More and more crypto projects and traditional companies are completing their "political entry" through it. What is truly being fed behind the scenes is not the developers or the investors, but those who possess bilingual abilities and can freely switch between crypto, traditional finance, and power.

As compliance becomes a scarce resource, a new hierarchy is quietly taking shape: the era no longer rewards those who run fast; power has returned to the keepers of the rules.