Quarterly revenue expectations big pump by 268 times, how high is Galaxy Digital's position in the coin stock frenzy?

Written by: BUBBLE

The development of cryptocurrency OTC platforms has had two explosive points, with the approval of Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs being significant for 2024. Regions like the EU and Dubai are gradually introducing frameworks (MiCA, VARA) that allow for the legal large-scale operation of over-the-counter trading, necessitating institutions to quickly procure underlying assets. By 2025, following the concept of "cryptocurrency capital" proposed by former US President Trump, traditional finance has made a complete 360-degree turn. After the introduction of various new cryptocurrency policies, Bitcoin reached a new high and Ethereum saw strong growth in early 2025, resulting in a surge in institutional asset allocation that fueled explosive growth in OTC platform trading.

Generally speaking, OTC trading matching directly connects buyers and sellers. They provide a single quote, so there is no slippage or bidding, and transfers are completed through escrow wallets and institutional accounts. Because orders never touch the public limit book, the market never sees your hand. As a dark pool of the "cryptocurrency market," OTC institutions do not disclose specific trading details of their users, but unlike traditional finance, we can find clues from on-chain queries.

In July 2025, one of the largest over-the-counter Bitcoin trades to date occurred, with 80,000 BTC changing hands for about $9 billion, yet the public market remained virtually unaffected. The mastermind behind this is Galaxy Digital, the most favored "crypto OTC institution" on Wall Street today, which also led to a 268-fold year-on-year increase in its Q2 revenue.

What role does the OTC platform play in this wave of compliance? How does Galaxy Digital leverage its resources to maneuver in the coin-stock trading? Rhythm BlockBeats has conducted a series of studies on this topic.

The third largest liquidity pillar in crypto

Accompanying this wave of institutional enthusiasm, OTC platforms have seemingly become the "third major liquidity pillar" in the crypto market, following centralized exchanges (CEX) and decentralized exchanges (DEX). For large amounts of capital, CEX/DEX find it challenging to directly accommodate buy orders in the hundreds of millions of dollars without causing significant volatility, so OTC platforms play the role of "white gloves" for institutions, completing their accumulation or liquidation behind the scenes.

In 2024, there was not a single month where the OTC trading volume was lower than the same period last year, indicating that market participants are increasingly inclined to trade through private channels rather than betting openly in the market. In their eyes, the crypto industry has gradually transformed from a marginal speculation into an acceptable asset allocation option, and Wall Street has shifted from skeptics to participants. Furthermore, this growth is expected to rise exponentially in 2025.

Finery Markets points out that the increasing number of traditional financial leaders shifting from "watching" to neutrality or acceptance is a significant reason for the surge in off-exchange trading volume. When more trades are conducted in dark pools, the apparent market volatility may be significantly smoothed out. According to the report released by Finery Markets for Q4 2024, it mentions that the overall trading volume on OTC platforms has increased by 106% compared to the previous year, and the OTC spot volume in the first half of 2025 is expected to grow by 112.6% year-on-year compared to the first half of 2024.

It is worth noting that while the compliance environment is improving in Europe and the United States, the Asian OTC market is also on the rise. Licensed OTC platforms in Hong Kong such as OSL, as well as emerging platforms in the UAE and Southeast Asia, are attracting large global liquidity. At the same time, some traditional block trading market makers like Flow Traders are also active in this space, using high-frequency and quantitative strategies to provide bilateral quotes for institutional clients on large cryptocurrency trades, enhancing execution efficiency and reducing impact costs. These factors collectively reinforce the position of OTC as an invisible pool in the cryptocurrency market.

The thriving Galaxy Digital

Among the many OTC players, Galaxy Digital, founded by Mike Novogratz, is undoubtedly a star in this wave of institutional buying frenzy. Galaxy is both a well-known crypto investment bank and operates a high-reach OTC trading business, mainly covering trading, investment, asset management, consulting, and mining lines of business. Its clients include top players such as publicly listed companies and hedge funds. However, the main pillar of its profitability is OTC spot trading and investment. Backed by the founder's 20 years of Wall Street experience and the company's compliance shaping post-IPO, more and more institutional funds are flowing in, and Galaxy's platform has staged astonishing block trade dramas, covering mainstream assets such as ETH and BTC, as well as popular coins like SOL and BNB.

Epic-level 80,000 BTC transaction lands smoothly

As mentioned earlier, an OTC transaction of 80,000 Bitcoins within 4 days, valued at up to 9 billion USD, set a record for one of the largest single transactions in cryptocurrency history, with the intermediary being Galaxy Digital.

Galaxy Digital announced on July 25 that it has been entrusted to complete a massive BTC sale for an early investor from the "Satoshi era." It is said that this is part of the investor's estate planning, and Galaxy did not disclose the client's identity, only stating that the transaction is a step in a broader wealth management strategy. Surprisingly, the clearing of these 80,000 BTC had almost no impact on the market; starting from July 17, ancient on-chain addresses began to move, transferring Bitcoin to Galaxy Digital's OTC address within a few days. The clearing of these 80,000 Bitcoins did not reflect on Bitcoin's price, although a few days later, after Galaxy's news was released, the price briefly dropped nearly 4% and fell below the $115,000 mark, but within a few hours, the price quickly rebounded to around $117,300.

Analyst Jason Williams pointed out that this massive sell-off has been "completely absorbed" by the market, while another analyst, Joe Consorti, lamented that "80,000 Bitcoins (over $9 billion) were sold at market price, yet the BTC price barely budged." On one hand, this once again tests the current OTC depth of the market, as there were counterparties able to absorb such a large volume of sell orders shortly after matching on exchanges. On the other hand, it highlights the importance of "dark pool trading" in today's cryptocurrency space. In fact, according to the publicly available OTC address (bc1q0), the total value of Bitcoins handled by Galaxy OTC Deck each week reaches hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, depending on market sentiment, while the real situation may be even more than this figure.

Preference of ETH coin stock companies

In Q2 2025, multiple unusually large buy orders appeared on the Ethereum chain, attracting close attention from the community. Since July 9, 14 new wallet addresses have cumulatively purchased an astonishing 856,554 ETH through OTC platforms like Galaxy Digital or FalconX, worth approximately $3.16 billion. These wallets had no history on the chain before suddenly accumulating large amounts of currency through OTC channels, indicating that "big players are quietly increasing their holdings of ETH."

On-chain analysis firm Arkham Intelligence pointed out that starting from late July, a newly created wallet address (0xdf0A…2EF3) accumulated purchases of approximately $300 million worth of ETH in just 3 days through Galaxy Digital's OTC trading desk. The address once held 79,461 ETH, costing around $300 million, with a paper loss of about $26 million (a drawdown of approximately 8.7%) calculated at the then market value of about $282.5 million. This indicates that the whale's average purchase price is relatively high, but it is still firmly increasing its positions.

As of today, August 5th, three new addresses have acquired a total of 63,837 ETH through Galaxy and FalconX, worth approximately $236 million. EyeOnChain has disclosed some of the buyer addresses, including 0x55CF…679, 0x8C6b…60, and 0x86F9…446. It is estimated that the cumulative buying power of these addresses reaches several tens of millions to several hundred million dollars, with a single wallet holding over 110,000 ETH at one point (valued at over $400 million).

Who exactly is behind this buying spree? There are signs pointing to SharpLink Gaming, which has loudly proclaimed since June 2025 that it will emulate MicroStrategy's strategy by continuously increasing its holdings of Ethereum as a primary treasury asset. According to its announcements and on-chain data, SharpLink crazily purchased nearly 500,000 ETH through ATM issuance financing and over-the-counter transactions from June to the end of July, holding 438,190 ETH as of July 27, an increase of 21% compared to a week earlier, with over 77,000 ETH purchased in a single week at an average weekly price of about $3,756.

As of the end of July, SharpLink has accumulated approximately 449,000 ETH. Entering August, the company continued to buy the dip, spending $43.09 million to acquire 11,259 ETH on July 31, and then purchasing another 18,680 ETH from Galaxy on August 4. Analysts state that SharpLink's total holdings have surpassed 499,000 ETH, with an average cost of around $3,064, and a current market value of about $1.8 billion, yielding an unrealized profit of approximately $275 million. This large-scale Ethereum buying was almost entirely completed through OTC desks like Galaxy and FalconX, with even the founder of Wintermute jokingly stating that "it's nearly impossible to buy ETH at our OTC desk now because the whales have already swept away the supply. Besides the current second largest holder of ETH, SharpLink, the largest holder, Bitmine, is also a deep partner of Galaxy."

The associated address 0xCd9 has currently transferred over $800 million worth of ETH to SharpLink. $153 million of ETH from 0xdf0, about $300 million from 0x286, and several other addresses are associated with both.

Although we cannot clarify where such intense large-scale OTC positions come from one by one, this undercurrent is becoming a key force in influencing the supply and demand of ETH. According to rough calculations by Rhythm BlockBeats based on several major Galaxy on-chain OTC addresses, the OTC trading in ETH over the past 90 days has reached 5.444 billion dollars, averaging about 1.8 billion dollars of ETH processed per month.

According to the four OTC wallets 0x335, 0x15, 0x46f, and 0xb9c disclosed by Arkham.

Acting as both referee and player, MicroStrategy's drama unfolds on the BNB Chain.

If BTC and ETH are the protagonists of 2024, then starting from the second half of 2025, BNB will also take the stage in institutional布局. In July, unexpected news emerged: CEA Industries, listed on the Nasdaq in the US (stock code VAPE, a company originally focused on agricultural temperature control and e-cigarettes), announced a complete transformation into a "BNB Treasury Company," planning to raise up to $1.25 billion through private financing and exercising options to purchase BNB. This plan caused VAPE's stock price to soar by 550% in a single day.

What is even more notable is that the mastermind behind VAPE's crypto pivot is David Namdar, co-founder of Galaxy Digital. He will take on the role of the new CEO of VAPE, while Russell Read, a partner from 10X Capital and former Chief Investment Officer of the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), will serve as CIO. Namdar stated that they will actively build BNB positions over the next 24 months using this fund of up to $500 million (with a maximum expansion to $1.25 billion), including open market purchases, strategic trades, and earning yields through staking and decentralized finance.

This means that BNB will welcome its first large-scale institutional buyers in the public market, and the OTC channels will undoubtedly play a key role in this. Due to the highly centralized issuance and circulation of BNB, Binance and its founder Zhao Changpeng (CZ) reportedly control 71% of the circulating BNB, and to absorb hundreds of millions of BNB without causing severe market fluctuations, they can only turn to over-the-counter bulk transactions or protocol transfers. Galaxy Digital's rich OTC network and liquidity resources will provide strong support for the "BNB version of the MicroStrategy initiative" led by Namdar. As the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization globally, this move signifies its formal entry into the institutional asset allocation landscape.

Whether it is the custody, trading, and on-chain ecological integrated trading platform that Coinbase focuses on, or the matching of cryptocurrency and stock relationships by consulting + OTC trading like Galaxy Digital, or the rapid integration of traditional brokers and trading platforms, various industries in the cryptocurrency field are beginning to move towards compliance and the aggregation of resources towards the top. Recently, the launch of the Crypto Project may be a public announcement of this significant trend, as the era of hegemony for compliance institutions is approaching, and the OTC platform for cryptocurrencies, known as the "transparent dark pool", may occupy a more important ecological position in the future.