Mike Belshe

Co-Founder & CEO BitGo

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Mike Belshe is co-founder and chief executive of BitGo, which he started in 2013 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in January 2026 under the ticker BTGO — the first crypto initial public offering of the year. BitGo’s business is custody: holding digital assets on behalf of institutions in a way those institutions can audit, insure and explain to a regulator. As of 30 September 2025 it safeguarded more than 1,550 distinct digital assets across multiple blockchains for over 4,900 clients in more than 100 countries, and had extended from its original multi-signature wallet technology into BitGo Bank & Trust, prime trading and infrastructure-as-a-service. Belshe’s route here is unusual for the sector: he spent the previous two decades building core internet infrastructure, at Netscape, at his own company that Microsoft bought, and at Google, where he co-invented SPDY and wrote the specification that became HTTP/2 and argued successfully for encryption by default.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and chief executive of BitGo since 2013; took the company public on the NYSE as BTGO in January 2026, the first crypto IPO of the year, after filing in September 2025.
• Grew BitGo to safeguard more than 1,550 digital assets for over 4,900 clients across more than 100 countries as of 30 September 2025.
• Pioneered multi-signature custody for institutional digital assets, and expanded into banking and trust, prime trading and infrastructure services.
• Co-invented the SPDY protocol at Google and was lead author of HTTP/2.0.
• Pushed for encryption by default in HTTP/2, an approach every major browser went on to adopt.
• Co-founded Lookout Software with Eric Hahn in 2004; Microsoft acquired it and built the technology into Outlook’s search.
• An early member of the Google Chrome team from 2006, and before that a Netscape engineer on the first commercial web servers.
• Holds more than ten technology patents.

Professional Journey

Belshe was born in 1971 and grew up near Berkeley. He took a computer science degree at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and began at Hewlett-Packard as a software engineer in 1993. In 1995 he joined Netscape Communications, working on enterprise web servers alongside Ben Horowitz, at the point when the commercial web was being built rather than described. He went on to be VP of applications at Supernews and held management roles at Good Technology and Critical Path.

In 2004 he co-founded Lookout Software with Eric Hahn, Netscape’s former chief technology officer. Lookout solved a problem that seems trivial now and was not then: searching your own email quickly. Microsoft bought the company and folded the technology into Outlook’s search.

He joined Google in 2006 and became an early member of the Chrome team, working under Sundar Pichai. His most durable work came out of that period. HTTP/1.1 had been designed for a web of documents and was throttling a web of applications, and Belshe co-invented SPDY, an experimental protocol that multiplexed requests over one connection, compressed headers and allowed the server to push resources. SPDY was then taken up by the IETF as the basis for HTTP/2.0, for which Belshe was lead author. He also argued during standardisation that the protocol should be encrypted by default — a contested position at the time, and one every major browser subsequently adopted in practice.

BitGo followed in 2013. The founding observation was the one the industry kept relearning the hard way: cryptographic bearer assets are trivially stealable, and institutions will not hold them without custody they can reason about. BitGo’s answer was multi-signature wallets, which split signing authority so that no single compromised key loses the funds, and which became the standard approach. Belshe has been consistent and public about the structural lesson from the sector’s failures — that custody must be separated from trading, because a firm that both holds customer assets and trades against them will eventually be tempted to use them.

The company expanded from wallets into a full institutional stack: a chartered bank and trust entity, prime brokerage and trading, and infrastructure sold to other firms that need custody they cannot build. In March 2025 it was appointed custodian for a stablecoin; in September 2025 it filed to go public; and in January 2026 it listed on the New York Stock Exchange as BTGO. Belshe framed the listing not as an exit but as a requirement of the customer base he now serves: institutions want infrastructure they can diligence, underwrite and trust over long horizons, and a public company is easier to diligence than a private one.

Education

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Bachelor’s degree, Computer Science