Crypto custodian BitGo announced on Tuesday the Acquisition of Harbor, a digital securities platform, along with its broker-dealer and transfer agent subsidiaries.
With this move, the US-headquartered company is moving forward towards its business expansion beyond crypto custody.
“Our vision has always been bigger than wallets and custody and acquiring Harbor furthers BitGo’s vision of building a new digital infrastructure for financial services,” said Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo. “We believe participants will ultimately need trusted, full-stack solutions for digital currencies and now BitGo is well positioned to address institutional requirements as the market develops.”
The company, however, refused to share the details of the deal.
Founded in 2017, Harbor grabbed headlines the next year after raising $38 million. However, all the hype turned negative when the platform failed to tokenize shares of a South Carolina apartment building.
Notably, the broker-dealer subsidiary of Harbor, which is included in the acquisition deal, is regulated by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, while the included transfer agent is supervised by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Diversifying business
BitGo’s goals to expand beyond its custody business was marked by its introduction of digital asset trading directly from the vault-stored funds, earlier this month.
The custodian also expanded its presence beyond its home country by expanding into Europe, opening two new custody entities - one in Germany and another in Switzerland.
Last year, BitGo also acquired Hedge, which enabled it to add stalking services to its platform.
“BitGo has been an important partner since Harbor inception. We’ve worked closely together to integrate BitGo Business Wallets and BitGo Custody into Harbor’s services,” Josh Stein, CEO of Harbor, added. “Harbor provides BitGo with a complementary technology stack for the lifecycle of digital securities, as well as important service capabilities through our digital assets broker-dealer and transfer agent subsidiaries.”
