theCUBE + NYSE Wired: BitGo IPO | Nick Ducoff, Solana

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Nick Ducoff

Head of Institutional Growth

Solana

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Investments: BitGo's Traditional and Tokenized Stock Purchases on Solana and Ondo's Equity Tokenization Innovations

play_circle_outline Optimism Soars: Improving Regulations and BitGo's IPO Fuel Crypto Market Activity Ahead of 2026's Promising Landscape

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Nick Ducoff, Solana

Nick Ducoff

Head of Institutional Growth Solana

In this interview from the NYSE floor as part of the Crypto Trailblazers series coverage of the BitGo IPO, Nick Ducoff, head of institutional growth at Solana Foundation, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the significance of digital asset infrastructure entering the public markets. Ducoff contextualizes BitGo’s debut as a pivotal moment for industry maturity, noting how it complements previous public listings of exchanges and stablecoin issuers. He highlights how BitGo’s pricing at the top of its range reflects strong institutional demand and signals a ... Read more

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Nick Ducoff, Solana

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John Furrier

>> Welcome back. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Broadcasting live from the show floor of the NYSE as part of our Crypto Trailblazers series coverage of the BitGo IPO. Nick is back. Nick head of institutional growth at Solana Foundation. Nick, great to see you again. I haven't talked to you since when you guys went to Abu Dhabi in December. Big event. Good to see you. Happy New Year.

Nick Ducoff

>> Likewise. It's great to see you, John.

John Furrier

>> IPOs are hot in 2026. BitGo first to go out. Huge milestone. Again, another crypto company continuing to thunder away. To see chain that we've been talking about on theCUBE. You guys have been a big part of it, Solana Foundation. Just overall growth has been phenomenal. The mainstreaming, platform, solid. I mean, BitGo's a platform company okay, and they're nailing custody and boom, services are coming out of it. Great revenue model. The market trends are behind them, regulatory environment solid, all speed ahead.

Nick Ducoff

>> I think it adds a new theme to public markets for crypto, right? We saw the exchanges go public in the last couple of years, Coinbase, Gemini, things of that nature. Then we saw Circle on the stablecoin side and then figure leading on to RWA tokenization. And now with infrastructure to see BitGo go public and price at the top end of the range. I think it really shows the maturity of the market.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And looking at the, they're going to ring the bell. So I can see from the market makers here, it's looking at 22 up from 18, real-time information. We'll see how it pops, but this really speaks to, I think we talked about last time you were on theCUBE, but here it's more relevant because this tokenization of assets on chain is not only happening, it's becoming the preferred mechanism to value and also manage and get more service out of things that used to be opaque, paper counting. I hear conversations around putting forests of trees that bear fruit on the chain. We're talking about, this is like real-world stuff.

Nick Ducoff

>> Absolutely. If you think about BitGo and what does the future look like for BitGo, what is the growth? Where's the growth going to come from? I think it's going to come from tokenization, right? Of course, there's going to be growth in digital assets, but where the real growth is going to come is real-world assets. And we've seen that on Solana, year-over-year, growth on Solana and real-world assets has been 600%. We're now at about 1.2 billion, and I expect that to continue to grow. So maybe we'll end the year at 10 billion or higher.

John Furrier

>> So as BitGo goes public, they're going to ring the bell, start trading, explain to people how trading works in the modern era because it'll trade as a stock, but you have tokenization on Solana. Explain this because this is very nuanced for us on the ropes, but for mainstream explain.

Nick Ducoff

>> Absolutely. Absolutely. So if you want to buy BitGo today on a traditional brokerage account, Fidelity, Schwab, E-Trade, you can do that, right? As soon as it starts trading, you'll be able to go in. You'll be able to place an order and buy BitGo. But an exciting announcement is that yesterday, Ondo tokenized 200 publicly traded equities on Solana, which is really awesome. Kraken and XOX had previously tokenized around 50. Now Ondo has another 200, but they're adding one today and that one is BitGo. So now in addition to be able to buy BitGo on a brokerage account in the United States, if you're anywhere in the world and you've got a crypto wallet, you can buy BitGo on Solana.

John Furrier

>> First of all, I'm smiling because I think this is the most coolest thing ever because what you just said means the stock trades in the market, but you're now tokenizing that equity. That's a real-world asset-

Nick Ducoff

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> On Solana. So for the folks watching that means is yeah, the stocks trading, but there's people that package it up in tokens, manage it as a tokenized equity.

Nick Ducoff

>> Yep.

John Furrier

>> This is an example of the stock market on Solana.

Nick Ducoff

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> I mean that's specific.

Nick Ducoff

>> And in some ways it's better than the existing stock exchanges because it trades 24/5. So it trades from Sunday 8PM until Friday 8PM. Markets don't sleep, and now you can buy your tokenized equities on Solana during those hours on Ondo. And then we also have another 50 stocks from Kraken that trade 24/7.

John Furrier

>> So the bell ceremonial, we're here at the NYSE, we love the NYSE, we love ICE.

Nick Ducoff

>> It's a special place.

John Furrier

>> It's a special place. They kind of originate here, but you're kind of having this decentralized market. What's the view in the Solana community? Because this is accelerating. What's next? We see stocks. What other things are we seeing? Because this is just going to continue. I mean, mango trees will be tokenized.

Nick Ducoff

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> I mean-

Nick Ducoff

>> Everything.

John Furrier

>> They're an asset. They produce revenue. Sometimes they're more than others, if the weather's good. I mean what's next? I mean, I just bring that up as an example, but I hear people talking about that.

Nick Ducoff

>> So the New York Stock Exchange, by the way, made an announcement of their own this week. They said we're going to be tokenizing everything. And that was in the front page of the business section of The Wall Street Journal. I'm sure that made some noise here on the floor.

John Furrier

>> Of course.

Nick Ducoff

>> And it's really exciting to see Nasdaq, NYSE, DTCC, some of the biggest players in the world say, hey, tokenization is real. It's here to stay. We're going that direction, and in my view, everything's going to be tokenized.

John Furrier

>> NYSE is owned by ICE. That's their parent company, International Confidential Exchange. They do a lot of trading stuff. They trade energy, so they get the idea of trading. So the fact that they're leaning in to crypto exchanges and trading is a huge deal, in my opinion. So, okay. That's kind of a tech thing and technical thing for the trading. What does that mean in your mind? You study these tech trends from the big data when we first met to now. As this goes mainstream, what does that mean for my sister? Smart people that aren't in tech or don't know all the bells and whistles, they hear stablecoins, USD1 versus USDG, USD... I mean, all this stuff kind of sounds very jargon-y.

Nick Ducoff

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> What's the bottom line? How do you see this evolving in words that people can understand?

Nick Ducoff

>> I think bottom line is important. Two things. One, access to capital for businesses of all shapes and sizes. So historically, if you were to raise capital in a private market, you have to either file a registration statement or you have to fall under a securities exemption, right? And the typical securities exemption, there are two, I mean there's many, but there's two that many companies raise in capital have historically tended to fall under. One is Reg D. This is for accredited investors. This is very patriarchal in my opinion. This is the government saying, unless you have a certain amount of money, you're not smart enough to be able to buy this asset. And I think that's unfair to the mass retail folks who are quite sophisticated, who can do their own research, who want access to these alternative investments. So that's one. The second thing is, is for international investors, that's Reg S historically, outside of the US. Folks outside of the US, depending on where you are, may not have access to buy even publicly traded equities at the same prices that you can buy on your brokerage account, Schwab or Fidelity. So what I think tokenizing on the blockchain really does is it flattens the playing field for everybody. It flattens the playing field for companies that are looking to raise capital and it flattens the playing field for investors that are looking to deploy it.

John Furrier

>> Nick, great to have you on. Final question. What does this IPO from BitGo mean? It's an infrastructure company, digital asset infrastructure company. There's builders out there waiting to come on faster. Certainly the regulatory environment. I hear folks saying early adopters, but I have folks saying, well, as soon as the regulatory environment solid as a rock, the fast followers come in. That's a tsunami, by the way, of builders. Solana is the leading platform for builders. What does this mean, the BitGo IPO mean for the marketplace?

Nick Ducoff

>> Yeah, it's really exciting to be here on BitGo's IPO. I was here for both the Bitwise Solana ETF launch and the Fidelity SOL ETF launch. And for BitGo to be going public today and it looking like it's going to perform well in the market, I think it's an important thing for the maturity of the ecosystem that again, not only exchanges, not only stablecoins and tokenization, but now infrastructure providers are going public and doing well too. So I think this indicates a very bright 2026 in my view. I'm bullish. I'm always bullish John, but very excited for what the year has to come.

John Furrier

>> Well, to me, it's all about digital. We all have an iPhone. We all either have Apple Pay, if it's on iPhones and Android phone, it's another wallet. We have Venmo, that's just digital payments with a centralized group. It's a no-brainer to have another wallet doing currency. So we're already there. Nick, great to have you on. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

Nick Ducoff

>> Thanks John, as always.

John Furrier

>> I appreciate it. All right. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here on the live stream on the floor of the NYSE, bringing you all the covers of BitGo IPO. We'll be right back after this short break.