NYDIG sold its trading desk for $42.5M. It kept 3 gigawatts.

BitGo closed its purchase of NYDIG's institutional trading business on 27 August 2026, and every story about it said the terms weren't disclosed. The 8-K BitGo filed the next day discloses them. Cash consideration of $7,000,000. Shares issued at closing worth about $35,500,000. That is $42.5 million for a derivatives, structured products, financing and capital markets desk, its client book, and roughly 30 people. Two revenue milestones can add $10 million and up to $5 million more in cash, plus further shares the filing doesn't value.

Hold that number next to what the seller kept. The desk BitGo bought sells derivatives, structured products, financing and capital markets solutions to asset managers, hedge funds, corporates and family offices, per BitGo's own release. NYDIG sold that and kept a power and compute development pipeline the same press release sizes at more than 3 GW, with over 1 GW deliverable in 2027 and 2028.

NYDIG's CEO said the quiet part in his own quote. "The discipline and intensity that built our trading franchise also drives our HPC data center development business, where we see one of the most significant opportunities ahead," said Tejas Shah. The trading franchise was the sentence's warm-up.

The number the press releases left out

Both sides announced this deal. Neither priced it. The Block and the wires that followed it all noted that terms weren't public, which was true of the press release and stopped being true the next day, when a public company had to file the merger agreement.

Item 1.01 of the 8-K breaks the consideration into four pieces:

• $7,000,000 in cash, subject to a holdback and adjustments for debt, cash and working capital
• closing shares of BitGo Class A common stock worth about $35,500,000
• $10,000,000 in cash contingent on a specified revenue milestone
• up to $5,000,000 in cash plus earn-out shares on a second revenue milestone

Separately, BitGo expects to grant transferred employees restricted stock units with a target value of $5,000,000 and cash retention awards worth another $5,000,000, both vesting on that second milestone. Those are compensation, not money to the seller, and they say something on their own: a fifth of the headline price again is what it costs to keep the desk in its seats.

Divide the $42.5 million at closing by the roughly 30 people who moved and you get about $1.4 million a head. Price a team that way and you are buying the people and their phone book. Franchises cost more.

The buyer is having a hard year

BitGo is the largest US crypto custodian and it went public in January. Per its Q2 2026 10-Q, it sold 11,026,365 Class A shares at $18.00 and started trading on the NYSE on 22 January, raising about $198.5 million gross and $174.0 million net. On 28 August the stock closed at $6.86, a market cap of roughly $806 million against a 52-week high of $24.50.

The filings explain the gap better than the price chart does. BitGo reported $4,329.4 million of total revenue for the quarter ended 30 June 2026. It also reported $4,190.4 million of digital asset sales cost against it. Almost all the top line is the gross proceeds of selling digital assets to clients on a principal basis, with the cost of those assets sitting right underneath.

What is left is $139 million for the quarter, and the company still posted a $17.4 million operating loss and a $19.0 million net loss. Six-month net loss: $79.7 million. The same quarter carries a $1.3 million restructuring charge with no comparable figure a year earlier.

Capital allocation tells the same story twice. Five months after raising $174 million net, the board authorized a share repurchase of up to $50 million on 17 June 2026. Two months after that, the company spent $7 million of cash and issued $35.5 million of its own stock to buy a trading desk. A management team that thought its shares were cheap in June paid with those shares in August. Both moves can be defensible. They cannot both be a strong signal about the share price.

Underneath that, the platform is shrinking while the client list grows. Assets on platform fell from $90.3 billion in Q2 2025 to $65.2 billion in Q2 2026. Assets staked fell from $25.6 billion to $11.9 billion. Client count went the other way, from 4,621 to 5,833. More institutions, less of their money. That is what fee compression looks like from the inside, and it is why a custodian buys a derivatives desk for $42.5 million instead of building one. The same logic is running through the rails business generally, and it looks a lot like Stripe buying OpenRouter rather than competing with it.

What NYDIG kept

NYDIG now describes itself as a company that "builds and operates vertically integrated power and compute infrastructure." Bitcoin mining appears in that sentence as one workload among several, listed after AI training and inference.

The pivot has a paper trail. In March 2025 NYDIG bought Crusoe's bitcoin mining business: more than 20 mining sites across seven states, a joint venture in Argentina, the flare mitigation technology, and over 270 MW of power generation gear that produces electricity at close to zero direct cost. The stated reason was access to stranded gas at the wellhead. NYDIG is an affiliate of Stone Ridge, whose energy arm the press release says owns and operates assets responsible for roughly 3% of US natural gas production.

Read in order, the last eighteen months are a company buying generation and selling intermediation.

One megawatt, priced

Here is the comparison that makes the $42.5 million land. On 6 July 2026 TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for roughly 401 MW of critical IT load at its Hawesville, Kentucky campus, expected to produce about $19 billion of contracted lease revenue over the initial term, and up to about $33 billion if both five-year extensions are exercised.

$19 billion across 401 MW is $47.4 million per megawatt of contracted revenue. NYDIG's entire institutional trading desk changed hands for $42.5 million at closing. One megawatt of a Kentucky data hall, under contract, carries a bigger number than the whole desk.

The comparison is a ratio, not a valuation. Twenty years of gross lease revenue is not a purchase price and is not profit. TeraWulf has to build the campus first, which costs billions it has not yet spent, and the revenue depends on a tenant honoring a two-decade commitment. That risk is the same risk running under the entire AI buildout, and it is worth reading who actually carries it before treating contracted revenue as money in hand.

What the ratio does show is relative scarcity. Institutional crypto trading capability is now cheap enough to buy for the cost of retaining the team. Interconnected megawatts are not.

What this does not prove

Four honest limits.

One deal is not a market. NYDIG sold a business it had decided not to fund. A seller with a better alternative use of capital takes a lower price. That is a fact about NYDIG's priorities before it is a fact about industry-wide multiples.

The price excludes what BitGo may still pay. Up to $15 million of contingent cash and an unvalued block of earn-out shares sit behind revenue milestones the filing does not describe. If the desk performs, the final number is higher than $42.5 million.

A pipeline is not a contract. NYDIG's 3 GW is development pipeline, and more than 1 GW is described as deliverable in 2027 and 2028. Deliverable is not leased. TeraWulf's $19 billion is signed. NYDIG has published no equivalent tenant commitment.

Custody is not trading. BitGo's own trading and financing revenue is far larger than what it bought. This deal adds derivatives and structured products to a platform that already has $65.2 billion sitting on it. Read it as a product gap being closed, and read the price as evidence of what that gap costs.

What to watch

Three things over the next two quarters.

Whether NYDIG announces a named tenant and a signed lease term for any part of that 1 GW. A pipeline converts or it does not, and the conversion is public when it happens.

Whether BitGo's next 10-Q separates trading and financing revenue enough to show what the NYDIG desk actually earns. The two revenue milestones in the merger agreement mean somebody inside both companies has a specific number in mind. Investors get to see it only if the segment disclosure allows.

Whether the pattern repeats. If another bitcoin financial services firm sells its markets business at a single-digit multiple of team retention cost while retaining power assets, the read stops being about NYDIG and starts being about where the margin in this industry went.

Sources

• BitGo Holdings, Form 8-K, filed 28 August 2026 (event date 27 August 2026)
• BitGo press release, Exhibit 99.1 to the 8-K, 27 August 2026
• BitGo Holdings, Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, filed 12 August 2026
• TeraWulf, Anthropic lease at Justified Data Campus, 6 July 2026
• NYDIG, acquisition of Crusoe's bitcoin mining business, 25 March 2025
• BitGo Holdings, Form 8-K, share repurchase authorization, 17 June 2026
• The Block, BitGo buys NYDIG institutional trading, 27 August 2026
• StockAnalysis, BTGO quote, close of 28 August 2026

This is not financial advice.