Written by: Lin Wanwan, Rhythm
In the crypto world, the loudest sound is not the trading with gongs and drums, but the connections that can quietly net 9 billion USD.
In July 2025, 80,000 dormant bitcoins that had been asleep for 14 years suddenly moved, marking one of the largest nominal bitcoin transactions in history. Such a scale of transfer would typically cause a 30% market drop, but the reality was—there was no significant crash, no panic; this batch of bitcoins was absorbed quietly by the market.
9 billion USD in chips were quietly consumed by the market. The operator is neither an exchange nor a hedge fund, but 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 the client? Was there a formal bidding process?
The CEO casually replied, 'This deal is more about relationships than quotes.'
Moreover, the Chinese billionaire CZ personally spearheaded the BNB treasury company, which quietly recruited former Galaxy Digital co-founder David Namdar as CEO.
Who exactly is behind Galaxy Digital? What kind of political and business resources did it utilize to secure these epic transactions? And what kind of new power structure is this network constructing for the crypto world?
High-level 'friend circles': Political capital in the boardroom
The key to this transaction lies not in the quoted prices but in the connections behind the scenes—all pointing to an old Wall Street figure.
The 56-year-old founder Mike Novogratz is a standard 'Wall Street creation'.
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 macro trading, asset portfolios, and national policies.
He then joined Fortress Investment Group, leading macro strategy investments and becoming one of the first key players in betting on emerging markets and sovereign debt within the group. During that period, he frequently interacted with policy institutions, central banks, and market departments in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, negotiating bond issues and exchange rate policies with local governments, becoming familiar with the game logic between leverage and sovereignty in the 'gray area'.
Between 2012 and 2015, he also became a member of the New York Federal Reserve's Investment Advisory Committee, directly participating in policy consulting, monetary mechanism research, and financial institution evaluations. This gave him a rare 'dual capability'—understanding derivatives trading and the language and rhythm of regulatory bodies.
This is a person who has dealt with the intersection of political power, Wall Street capital, and information for over a decade.
He invested heavily in Bitcoin and Ethereum as early as 2013, with a total investment of about 7 million USD. By 2017, he publicly stated in an interview with CNBC: 'In the past two years, I have made over 250 million USD from crypto assets.'
However, he is neither a 'native' of the crypto industry nor a typical speculator. His true shift happened in 2015—when he incurred losses from heavy investments in the Brazilian interest rate market and retreated from the fortress, briefly stepping back from frontline investment. It was during this 'downtime' that he first seriously examined Bitcoin, re-establishing 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 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, and regulatory lobbying that exists in the traditional financial world is almost non-existent in the crypto world. This is a 'systemic wasteland' that urgently needs reconstruction.
Galaxy Digital was born in this structural gap.
In 2018, Novogratz personally invested 350 million USD, successfully going public through the reverse merger of a Canadian shell company, Bradmer Pharmaceuticals, becoming the first crypto financial platform to provide full-stack services to institutions. This is a company designed to be the 'Wall Street version of an on-chain investment bank'.
However, the journey from the Canadian exchange to NASDAQ took Galaxy Digital a total of 1,320 days, nearly four years. During this time, the company underwent nine rounds of feedback from the SEC, countless legal reviews, and invested over 25 million USD to meet compliance requirements. Amidst a collective regulatory winter where the entire crypto industry faced obstacles and frequently 'went overseas', Galaxy persevered.
It is not a trading platform, nor a VC, but a 'financial structural service provider' in the crypto field. Galaxy Digital was designed by him to be the 'Wall Street version of on-chain Goldman Sachs'. Its structural design bears the imprint of his Wall Street background.
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 ETF liquidity integration; the policy path benchmarks Brookings: establishing policy research teams, writing reports, participating in hearings, and entering regulatory sandboxes; the compliance path benchmarks Deloitte and EY: creating a 'legal packaging system for digital assets' that support financial report accounting and audit disclosures.
At the core of all this is the 'political-business network' established by the Galaxy board.
Among Galaxy Digital's board members is Tyler Williams, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, who was seconded as a special advisor on digital assets in 2025 by the current Treasury Secretary—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 pushing various legislation related to mining sites, electricity prices, and taxes, being a key figure behind Galaxy's successful transformation of bitcoin mining sites into AI computing centers.
This structure of 'policy-capital-technology' convergence gives Galaxy an extremely rare 'policy influence ability' among crypto companies.
In the new financial structure he built, Galaxy is not just doing trading and asset management, but also acts as a 'legal electrification' service provider 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 rather stresses 'structural arrangements'; he has never used price as the only metric, focusing instead on whether privacy, regulation, systems, finance, custody, and compliance pathways are genuinely open.
This also explains why, although Galaxy is not the strongest in terms of traffic, it became the only player able to secure large orders and complete settlements during that quiet transaction of 80,000 bitcoins.
Many people think Galaxy Digital's moat is capital, but the real advantage lies in its political-business sensibility.
Bankers behind crypto treasuries
The 80,000 bitcoins are just a corner of this network, with companies represented by Chinese billionaire CZ also starting to view Galaxy Digital as a 'political passport' to compliance.
In mid-2025, a new mainstream narrative emerged in the US stock market: crypto equity stocks. The US stock market was witnessing a capital 'shell game': putting BTC and ETH into listed companies, allowing crypto assets to appear on Wall Street under the guise of financial reports.
However, just before the end of 2023, this was still viewed as a 'forbidden zone' in the capital market.
It is actually 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'—when the price drops, it must be impaired; when it rises, it cannot be counted as income, leading to serious distortions in company financial reports, making audits difficult to pass.
For example, if you buy 10,000 ETH, you must immediately account for losses if it drops, but if it rises, you act as if you didn't see it and cannot count it as profit. This makes corporate financial reports look terrible and complicates audits. The FASB's new regulations, effective from the 2025 fiscal year, which allow for 'fair value' accounting—counting profits when the price rises—finally opened the path for 'compliant holding of cryptocurrencies'.
Galaxy is the earliest service provider to enter the market and bring a batch of listed companies into the 'legal entry'.
The first to sniff out the opportunity was a group of ancient whales holding ETH. They quietly packaged their ETH into US shell companies, using a left-hand-to-right-hand method to realize their investments without disturbing the market, leveraging US stock liquidity for a disguised cash-out. SharpLink Gaming is the leader in this cash-out strategy.
Soon, Chinese billionaire CZ also followed suit—putting his company's platform token BNB into US stock companies, merging, packaging, going public, converting platform tokens into compliant assets, and then entering the capital valuation system.
Behind this series of operations, Galaxy Digital has quietly surfaced—it is the consultant orchestrating the entire script.
It customizes narrative solutions for these companies regarding 'crypto treasuries': from OTC trading, asset custody, to compliance disclosure and staking returns, each step cannot bypass the political-business channels it has built, and each step precisely treads the gray area between regulatory blind spots and capital leverage.
