Crypto Custodian BitGo Adds New Stablecoins in Bid to Woo Institutions

BitGo has added support for its 101st asset as the crypto custody startup works to offer a wide spectrum of services for institutional investors.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, BitGo now handles the Winklevoss brothers' Gemini dollar, which followed its hundredth asset, Circle's Circle USD, added on Nov. 6.

Both are so-called stablecoins, designed to maintain parity with the U.S. dollar, as are other BitGo additions over the past six months such as MakerDAO's dai, Paxos' Paxos Standard and TrustToken's TrueUSD. This asset class represents one of the year's most popular new flavors of cryptocurrency, with a new stablecoin introduced seemingly every week promising the speed and ease of bitcoin without the volatility.

According to the company's internal record of API requests from October 9 to November 9, BitGo clients submitted 151,768 searches for TUSD and 137,649 for USDC, followed by dai with 28,894 API requests.

Although stablecoins are hardly the only category represented across BitGo's offerings, some experts believe the trend of adding support for such assets highlights how competition is influencing the startup's strategy.

"People [are] trying to find new revenue streams. And when that can't be done through volume, it has to be done through adding new product lines, new premium services for which you can charge the user, and finding new ways to extend your business model."

Only time will tell if BitGo's strategy will help it attract more institutional customers as the competition heats up.

Demirors, for one, is skeptical because such investors already have established relationships with brands like Fidelity and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, which will launch a new trading and custody platform called Bakkt next month.

A custodian like BitGo that supports such assets is effectively giving investors another way to manage risk, Becker said.

Regardless of whether these customers prefer fiat-backed or crypto-backed stablecoins, BitGo aims to cover the whole spectrum and diversify beyond bitcoin.