Custody was once the hardest problem in digital assets: keeping holdings secure, ensuring private keys did not fall into the wrong hands, and building infrastructure solid enough to let institutions sleep at night. BitGo has largely solved that problem. Now its Chief Product Officer, Eugene Hahr, is turning his attention to what comes after.

From Custody to Asset Servicing

The digital asset industry has spent the better part of a decade perfecting the vault. BitGo, founded in 2013, now supports more than 1,550 digital assets and serves over 4,900 clients across 100 countries. The question Hahr is focused on is what gets built on top of that foundation.

Tokenization, in this context, means representing ownership a traditional security as a digital token — and it only becomes useful to institutions if the rights attached to that ownership travel with it. The answer, increasingly, is asset servicing for tokenized securities: dividend distributions, voting rights retention, and claims transfers. These are the kinds of operational minutiae that traditional custodians such as BNY Mellon and State Street have handled for decades in equities markets, but that barely exist in crypto infrastructure today. Without that servicing layer, a tokenized share risks becoming an asset detached from the economic rights that make it worth holding.

This is not a theoretical exercise. The London Stock Exchange has been developing tokenized stock initiatives, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has made regulatory progress that is starting to create a clearer path for tokenized assets in the United States. When a stock gets tokenized, someone still needs to ensure the holder receives their dividend, facilitate proxy voting, and process corporate actions. That someone, Hahr is betting, should be BitGo.

Going Public and Building Out the Team

BitGo went public on the New York Stock Exchange in January 2026 under the ticker BTGO. The company acquired NYDIG's institutional trading business, adding execution capabilities to its custody and settlement stack. It also launched BitGo Research on September 24, 2026, and brought on new leadership in compliance and research.

Read together, the moves amount to BitGo assembling in-house what institutions have traditionally sourced from multiple counterparties — execution, custody, settlement, research, and compliance — making the breadth of the stack central to its asset-servicing pitch.

The Tokenization Race Heats Up

BitGo is not operating in a vacuum. The race to become the infrastructure layer for tokenized real-world assets has attracted serious competition from players such as Fireblocks, Anchorage Digital, and Coinbase's institutional arm.

The regulatory environment is adding both opportunity and friction. SEC progress on tokenized securities frameworks gives companies like BitGo a clearer target to build toward. Hahr's conviction-driven approach suggests BitGo plans to make directional bets on where regulation is heading rather than waiting for perfect clarity before building.

How the SEC's framework work develops, and whether the LSE's tokenized stock initiatives progress toward live markets, are the near-term markers to watch for how quickly the asset-servicing opportunity Hahr is betting on takes shape.