Traditional finance settles trades like it’s still faxing paperwork. Crypto settles them in seconds. BitGo’s COO Jody Mettler thinks onchain asset management is the connective tissue that finally makes these two worlds play nice together.
Speaking at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam on June 11, Mettler laid out how BitGo’s infrastructure, particularly its Go Network, can help institutions automate trading while keeping assets locked in cold storage. The pitch comes weeks after BitGo went public on the NYSE under the ticker BTGO, a milestone that itself says a lot about where institutional crypto custody is headed.
The settlement gap problem
Here’s the thing about traditional finance: it’s slow. Equity trades in the US only recently moved to T+1 settlement, meaning it still takes a full business day for a stock trade to actually finalize. Cross-border payments can take even longer, sometimes days, depending on the corridors involved.
Mettler’s argument is straightforward. Onchain asset management tools can compress that settlement timeline for traditional financial products by leveraging blockchain rails. Instead of waiting for a chain of intermediaries to confirm and reconcile every transaction, you put the process onchain where it happens automatically and transparently.
