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Who Advised Chinese Billionaire CZ on the IPO?

林晚晚

2025-08-07 10:00

Read this article in 15 Minutes

The era no longer rewards the fast runners; power is returning to the custodians of the rules.

Author | Lin Wanwan

Editor | Jack

In the crypto world, the loudest noise is not the flashy transactions but the network capable of quietly pocketing $9 billion.

In July 2025, 80,000 Bitcoins that had been dormant for 14 years suddenly moved, marking one of the largest nominal Bitcoin transactions in history. A transfer of this scale should have triggered a 30% market drop, but the reality was—no major crash, no panic; the market quietly absorbed this batch of Bitcoins.

The $9 billion in chips were silently taken in by the market. The orchestrator was neither an exchange nor a hedge fund but a somewhat obscure Wall Street player: Galaxy Digital.

During the latest earnings call on the evening of August 5, someone asked the CEO how they managed to secure the 80,000 BTC client. Was there a formal bidding process?

The CEO casually replied, "In this deal, relationships matter more than quotes."

Furthermore, BNB Treasury Company, personally led by the Chinese richest man CZ, quietly brought in former Galaxy Digital co-founder David Namdar as CEO.

Who is behind Galaxy Digital? What kind of political and business resources were mobilized to execute these epic trades? And how is this web of relationships shaping a new power structure in the crypto world?

High-Level "Circle of Friends": Political Capital in the Boardroom

The key to this transaction lies not in the front-end quotes but in the backstage network—a network that leads to an old Wall Street figure.

56-year-old founder Mike Novogratz is the epitome of "Wall Street-made."

He spent 11 years at Goldman Sachs, starting from the Southeast Asia Futures Desk and eventually becoming a fixed income partner. Novogratz was part of the few who could navigate between macro trades, asset portfolios, and national policies.

He then joined Fortress Investment Group, spearheading macro strategy investments and being a key figure in the group's early bets on emerging markets and sovereign debt. During that time, he frequented policy institutions, central banks, and market departments in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, negotiating bond issuances and exchange rate policies with local governments, familiar with the game logic between leverage and sovereignty in the "gray zone."

Between 2012 and 2015, he also became a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Investment Advisory Committee, directly participating in policy consultations, monetary mechanism research, and financial institution evaluations. This gave him the rare "dual capability" — understanding both derivative trading and the language and rhythm of regulatory bodies.

This is someone who has spent over a decade at the intersection of political power, Wall Street capital, and information.

As early as 2013, he used his own funds to heavily invest in Bitcoin and Ethereum, with a total investment of about $7 million. By 2017, in an interview with CNBC, he publicly stated, "Over the past two years, I have made over $250 million from crypto assets."

However, he is not a native of the crypto industry, nor a typical speculator. His true turning point came in 2015 — the year he suffered losses from heavily investing in the Brazilian interest rate market, exited the fortress, and briefly retreated from the front lines of the investment field. It was also during that "downtime" that he seriously examined Bitcoin for the first time, 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 build a new "financial system design" belonging to the on-chain world. He said, "What I see is a systemic blank — the liquidity in the crypto world is getting deeper, but there is no structure."

In his view, a complete chain of traditional financial world elements such as asset management, market making, clearing, ETF custody, PIPE financing, audit disclosure, regulatory lobbying, etc., is almost non-existent in the crypto world for benchmarking. It is a "institutional wilderness" in urgent need of reconstruction.

Galaxy Digital was born in this structural crevice.

In 2018, Novogratz personally invested $350 million, successfully went public through a reverse merger with the 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, from the Canadian exchange to Nasdaq, Galaxy Digital took a total of 1,320 days, nearly four years. During this period, the company went through nine rounds of feedback from the SEC, numerous legal reviews, and invested over $25 million to meet compliance requirements. In a collective industry-wide blockade and frequent regulatory "wintering" trend of "going offshore," Galaxy persisted.

It is not a trading platform, nor a VC firm, but a “Financial Infrastructure Service Provider” in the crypto space. Galaxy Digital was designed by him to be the “Wall Street version of an on-chain Goldman Sachs”. His Wall Street background is evident throughout the design of the structure:

The service list is benchmarked against Goldman Sachs: covering asset management, market making, OTC trading, proprietary investment research, risk management, financial advisory; the trading structure is benchmarked against Citadel: supporting dark pool matching, low-latency derivatives system, interoperability with ETF liquidity; the policy path is benchmarked against Brookings: establishing a policy research team, writing reports, participating in hearings, entering regulatory sandboxes; and the compliance path is benchmarked against Deloitte and EY: creating a “digital asset legal packaging system” that supports financial statement recognition, audit disclosure.

And at the core of all this is the “Government-Business Circle” built by the Galaxy board of directors.

Among the board members of Galaxy Digital is Tyler Williams, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, who in 2025 was seconded by the current Secretary of the Treasury as a special advisor on digital assets—he is able to translate crypto language into regulatory language, serving as a key bridge between Galaxy and institutions such as the SEC, CFTC, FASB.

Another board member is Doug Deason, one of the most influential local real estate and energy lobbyists in Texas. He has been involved in promoting various legislation related to mining, electricity prices, taxation, and was a key figure behind Galaxy's successful transformation of a Bitcoin mining facility into an AI computing power center.

This “Policy-Capital-Technology” convergence structure enables Galaxy to have a very rare “policy influence capability” among crypto companies.

In the new financial structure he has built, Galaxy is not just trading and asset management, but also a “legitimate onboarding” service provider for traditional companies entering the blockchain world.

Compared to CZ's extreme operational capability and SBF's aggressive fund deployment, Mike Novogratz is a different kind of founder. He never emphasizes “decentralization,” but rather “structural arrangements”; he has never used coin price as the sole metric, but rather focuses on whether privacy, regulation, governance, institutional, financial, custody, and compliance paths are truly unblocked.

This also explains why, although Galaxy may not be the strongest in terms of traffic, in that 80,000 BTC trade, it became the only player to take down large orders, complete settlements, and reassure counterparties quietly.

Many people think that Galaxy Digital's moat is its funds, but the real advantage is its political-business acumen.

The Banker Behind the Crypto Treasury

The 80,000 bitcoins are just one piece of this network. Represented by CZ, the richest Chinese, companies have also begun to see Galaxy Digital as a "political passport" to compliance.

By mid-2025, a new mainstream narrative in the U.S. stock market quietly emerged: crypto stocks. A capital "reverse takeover" is taking place on Wall Street: putting BTC, ETH into publicly traded companies, allowing crypto assets to appear on Wall Street under the guise of financial reports.

However, before the end of 2023, this was still considered a "forbidden zone" in the capital market.

U.S. companies actually find it difficult to "hold coins legally" because the financial system cannot handle it. According to the accounting standards of the time, such as FASB, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could only be recognized as "intangible assets"—if the price drops, it needs to be written down, and gains cannot be recognized, resulting in serious distortion of company financial statements and difficulty in passing audits.

For example, if you buy 10,000 ETH, you need to recognize the loss immediately if the price drops, but if it rises, you pretend not to see it and cannot count it as profit. This makes the corporate financial statements look bad and the audit a mess. Only from the 2025 fiscal year onwards, with the new FASB rules based on "fair value" pricing, gains from asset appreciation can be recognized, truly opening the pathway to "compliant holding."

Galaxy was the first to enter and brought a group of publicly traded companies into the "legitimate entry" service.

The first to sense the opportunity were a group of ancient whales in the ETH world. They quietly packaged their ETH into U.S. stock shell companies and, without disturbing the market, leveraged U.S. stock liquidity to cash out in a roundabout way. SharpLink Gaming was the leader in this "cashing out" strategy.

Soon, CZ, the richest Chinese, also followed suit—putting his company's platform coin BNB into U.S. stock companies, shell mergers, packaging, listing, turning the platform coin into a compliant asset, and then entering the capital valuation system.

Behind this series of operations, Galaxy Digital had quietly emerged—it is the mastermind advisor of the whole script.

It tailored a "crypto treasury" narrative solution for these companies: from OTC accumulation, asset custody, to regulatory disclosure, staking rewards, every step cannot escape the political-business channel it has built, every step precisely treading the gray area between regulatory blind spots and capital leverage.

……