Written by: Lin Wanwan, Rhythm
In the crypto world, the loudest transactions are not those with fanfare, but rather the connections that can quietly pocket $9 billion.
In July 2025, an address holding 80,000 Bitcoins that had been dormant for 14 years suddenly sold, marking one of the largest nominal Bitcoin transactions in history. Such a large transfer should have triggered a 30% market drop, but the reality was—no major flash crash, no panic; these Bitcoins were quietly absorbed by the market.
The $9 billion chip was 'quietly' 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 second-quarter earnings call on August 5, someone asked the CEO: How did you secure 80,000 BTC from clients? Was there a formal bidding process?
The CEO casually replied: 'This deal is more about relationships than quotes.'
Moreover, the BNB treasury company personally operated by Chinese billionaire CZ has quietly brought in former Galaxy Digital co-founder David Namdar as CEO.
Who is really behind Galaxy Digital? What kind of political and business resources have been used to make these epic transactions possible? And what new power structure is this network creating for the crypto world?
The senior 'circle of friends': political capital within the board
The key to this transaction is not the quoted price on stage, but the connections behind the scenes—everything points to an old Wall Street person.
The founder Mike Novogratz, who was 56 years old, is a typical 'Wall Street maker.'
He worked at Goldman Sachs for 11 years, starting from the Southeast Asian futures desk and eventually becoming a fixed income partner. At that time, Novogratz was one of the few people who could navigate between macro trading, asset portfolios, and national policies.
He then joined Fortress Investment Group, leading macro strategy investments and was one of the first key figures to bet on emerging markets and sovereign debt within the group. During that period, he frequently entered policy agencies, 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 logic of leverage and sovereignty in the 'gray areas.'
From 2012 to 2015, he became a member of the New York Federal Reserve's Investment Advisory Committee, directly participating in policy consulting, monetary mechanism research, and financial institution evaluation. This gave him a rare 'dual capability'— understanding both derivatives trading and the language and rhythm of regulatory bodies.
This is someone who has been dealing with the intersection of political power, Wall Street capital, and information for over ten years.
He had already heavily invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum with his own funds back in 2013, totaling approximately $7 million. By 2017, during an interview with CNBC, he publicly stated, 'In the past two years, I have made over $250 million from crypto assets.'
However, he is neither a 'native' of the crypto industry nor a typical speculator. His real pivot occurred in 2015— the year he exited the fortress after heavy losses in the Brazilian interest rate market and briefly retreated from frontline investing. It was during that 'blank period' that he seriously examined Bitcoin for the first time, reconstructing his understanding of currency, credit, and financial infrastructure.
But Novogratz did not stop at merely 'holding Bitcoin' like many early crypto evangelists. His ambition lies in establishing a new 'financial system design' for the on-chain world. He said, 'What I see is a systemic blank— liquidity in the crypto world is deepening, 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, almost has no counterpart in the crypto world. This is a 'wasteland of systems' in urgent need of reconstruction.
Galaxy Digital was born in this structural gap.
In 2018, Novogratz invested $350 million of his own money and successfully went public through a shell company, Bradmer Pharmaceuticals, becoming the first crypto financial platform to offer full-stack services to institutions. This is a company designed as the 'Wall Street version of on-chain investment banking.'
However, from the Canadian exchange to Nasdaq, Galaxy Digital took a total of 1,320 days, nearly four years. During this time, the company went through nine rounds of feedback from the SEC, countless legal reviews, and invested over $25 million to meet compliance requirements. In an entire crypto industry collectively hindered and frequently 'going overseas,' Galaxy persevered.
It is not a trading platform, nor a VC, but a 'financial structuring service provider' in the crypto field. Galaxy Digital was designed by him as the 'Wall Street version of on-chain Goldman Sachs.' Its structural design bears the imprint of his Wall Street background everywhere.
The service list benchmarks Goldman Sachs: covering asset management, market making, OTC trading, proprietary research, risk management, and financial advisory; the trading structure benchmarks Citadel: supporting dark pool matching, low latency derivatives systems, and connectivity with ETF liquidity; the policy pathway benchmarks Brookings: establishing policy research teams, writing reports, participating in hearings, and entering regulatory sandboxes; the compliance pathway benchmarks Deloitte and EY: creating a 'legal asset packaging system' that supports financial statement accounting and audit disclosure.
At the core of all this is the 'political-business circle of friends' built by the Galaxy board.
Among Galaxy Digital's board members is Tyler Williams, who previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and was borrowed by the current Treasury Secretary in 2025 as a special advisor on digital assets—he can translate crypto language into regulatory language and is an important bridge for Galaxy's communication with the SEC, CFTC, FASB, and other institutions.
There is also board member Doug Deason, one of the most influential real estate and energy lobbyists in Texas. He has participated in promoting several mining, electricity pricing, and tax-related legislations, and is a key figure behind Galaxy's successful conversion of Bitcoin mining sites into AI computing centers.
This structure of 'policy-capital-technology' convergence gives Galaxy an extremely rare 'policy influence capability' among crypto companies.
In this new financial structure he has built, Galaxy is not just trading and asset management; it is also a 'legitimate electricity service provider' for traditional companies entering the on-chain world.
Compared to CZ's extreme operational capacity and SBF's aggressive funding strategies, Mike Novogratz is a different kind of founder. He never emphasizes 'decentralization,' but rather stresses 'structural arrangements'; he has never used coin prices as the only metric, but pays more attention to whether privacy, regulation, systems, finance, custody, and compliance pathways are genuinely connected.
This also explains why, although Galaxy is not the strongest in terms of flow, in the quiet transaction of 80,000 Bitcoins, it became the only player capable of securing large orders, completing settlements, and reassuring counterparties.
Many people think that Galaxy Digital's moat is capital, but the real advantage is its political and business sensibility.
The banker behind the crypto treasury
80,000 Bitcoins are just a corner of this network; companies represented by Chinese billionaire CZ are also beginning to see Galaxy Digital as a 'political passport' to compliance.
By mid-2025, a new mainstream narrative in the US stock market quietly emerged: crypto stock. The US stock market is staging a capital 'shell game': packing BTC and ETH into listed companies, allowing crypto assets to appear on Wall Street in the name of financial statements.
But before the end of 2023, this was still considered a 'taboo' in the capital market.
It is actually very difficult for US companies to 'legally hold coins,' due to the financial system's inability to support it. According to the FASB accounting standards at the time, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could only be accounted for as 'intangible assets'— if the coin price dropped, it had to be impaired, but if it rose, it could not be counted as income, resulting in severely distorted corporate financial statements, making audits difficult to pass.
For example, if you buy 10,000 ETH, you have to immediately account for losses if it drops, but if it rises, you pretend you didn't see it, and cannot count it as profit. This makes corporate financial statements look terrible, and auditing becomes a disaster. The new FASB regulations will only begin to value at 'fair value' from the 2025 fiscal year, allowing for gains when the price of coins rises, truly opening the pathway for 'compliant holding of coins.'
Galaxy was one of the first service providers to enter the market and bring a batch of listed companies in 'legally.'
The first to sense the opportunity were a group of ancient ETH whales. They quietly packaged their ETH into US stock shell companies and, through a left-hand to right-hand method, completed disguised cashing out without startling the market, leveraging US stock liquidity. SharpLink Gaming is the leader in this 'cashing out technique.'
Soon, Chinese billionaire CZ followed suit— stuffing his company's platform currency BNB into US companies, shelling, packaging, listing, and turning platform currency into compliant assets, then entering the capital valuation system.
And behind this series of operations, Galaxy Digital has quietly emerged— it is the advisory consultant for the entire script.
It provides these companies with tailored 'crypto treasury' narrative solutions: from OTC building, asset custody, to compliance disclosure and staking yields, every step cannot be separated from the political-business channels it has built, accurately stepping into the gray areas between regulatory blind spots and capital leverage.
