99Bitcoins Exclusive: BitGO Europe Head Brett Reeves Says “Don’t Use One Provider, Use Multiple”
Brett Reeves, Head of European Sales for BitGo – the company known for its crypto custody and security solutions, said, “This might sound very strange for a salesperson such as myself to say but don’t use one provider. Use multiple.”
“Once you reach critical mass, start to diversify. We have a saying in the UK, don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Separate them out.” He recently took to stage during the Nordic Blockchain Association on 18 June 2025 and said, “I was at Lehman Brothers when Lehman went down. I’ve been in prime brokerage for 20 years before I came into crypto. You have to have multiple people providing services to you.”
Gianluca Di Meo, the UK and Nordics Sales Head at Taurus said, “I completely echo those sentiments – from the perspective of being a salesperson, and as an infrastructure provider. There’s more than one infrastructure provider necessary and even potentially different models like a self-custody model that we could facilitate or a different kind of sub-custody model.”
“Traditional finance firms and banks are going to struggle a little bit. Because they are quite rigid in their ways”
Furthermore, talking about adaptability, Reeves said, “If you look at traditional finance, people had to adapt to come into this space. I think, if you’re a custodian or a wallet provider in this space, you’re continually having to adapt- whether it’s new tokens or real world assets and so on. It’s an evolving model but, our companies just need to keep going through this cycle. And this is where traditional finance firms, banks, and so on are going to struggle a little bit. Because they are quite rigid in their ways, still.
They are using a 1980s technology in SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) for sending assets around the world. So it is going to be harder for banks to keep up.
I’m not saying they’re not going to be able to, but that’s where they may choose to use something like Zodia Custody because they just want to outsource and use a sub-custodian model to look after the digital assets.”
He added, “BitGo has a slightly different approach. We can do that. But we can also do custody as service.”
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“You can lean on MiCA”
Talking about clear regulations, reeves said, “I think Europe with Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) is one of the ones you could lean on. In the US, they’re still trying to come forward with that- a number of custodians who use trust structures over there.”
Notably, BitGo received its MiCA license just last month.
USA born @BitGo , a leading cryptocurrency custody provider, has secured a Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) license from Germany’s financial regulator, BaFin.https://t.co/ZnFIExhsVS
— Akriti Seth (@AkritiSethN) May 13, 2025
Adding to this, Di Meo said, “Some of the most highly regulated institutions in the world – they’ve got incredible fiscal power. Within reason they can do whatever they want. They can build whatever they want. The fundamental reason why this hasn’t proliferated through financial markets yet, and I’ll talk about crypto custody or digital asset custody, is that the regulatory picture hasn’t been there to facilitate these large institutions to actually operate. The only reason they would offer the service is if they can have complete regulatory clarity and know that when they take this service to market, they’re going to be doing so within the confines of what the regulator is comfortable with. Let’s remember again, they’ve been established for in excess of 100, maybe 200 years. From a reputational standpoint, they have a lot to lose, right? And that’s where this trust model comes in, right? If you’re an established player in the space, you want to maintain that trust, you have to comply with the regulator.”
We’ve seen examples where the interpretation of MiCA has been very much that you need to rely on more than one provider in the custody space alone in order to be compliant.
“BitGo and Zodia have differing approaches to what one can do as a digital asset custodian”
Gerry Afentakis, Managing director Europe at Zodia custody weighed in and said, “Apart from being a custodian, the company has to do other things with those assets that involve generating a yield, borrowing, lending. You want to maybe stake, you want to trade, you want to do a variety of things. And so our approach at Zodia Custody (and there’s no right or wrong- it’s just a difference in philosophy and maybe it’s also a different commercial model), we believe that just doing the custody part is hard enough and that should be our priority.”
“We happen to find ourselves in a digital asset world where things are moving really fast and where a lot of the innovation and activity happens in the unregulated space. Things are adopted and seminal evolutions are happening. We need to somehow be participating in and supporting our more regulated risk managed service to include these kind of evolutions.”
“We plug in with best in class service providers who are going to do all the other little suite of services that our clients holding the digital assets want to do. And that has certain advantages,” Afentakis added.
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