Private Markets Sector

BitGo acquired NYDIG's institutional trading business for $42.5 million in cash and stock, alongside a $15 million earnout tied to revenue milestones. The transaction folds approximately 30 employees and NYDIG IF Holdings into the custody provider, bringing derivatives, structured products, and financing capabilities onto its platform. The purchase price breaks down into $7 million in cash, roughly $35.5 million in stock, and the contingent payout. NYDIG plans to redirect its capital toward power generation, bitcoin mining, and data center development.

Investors in digital asset ventures tied to Donald Trump and his family have lost at least $4.7 billion. A report published Thursday by the watchdog organization Public Citizen details the losses across multiple crypto products, led by the Official Trump memecoin. That token alone left buyers $3.2 billion underwater after a rapid surge and subsequent collapse, with analytics showing that 65 percent of wallets are in the red while the top one percent captured 80 percent of all gains. President Trump himself invested no cash into the project, instead collecting $635 million in licensing fees last year. Additional losses came from World Liberty Financial governance tokens and digital trading cards, even as Trump generated $1.4 billion in total crypto-related earnings for 2025. Public Citizen used the findings to call for ethics provisions in the upcoming Digital Asset Market Clarity Act that would force a sitting president to divest from the industry.

Bullish has extended a $100 million stablecoin-based debt facility to USD.AI to finance loans secured by graphics processing units. USD.AI will deploy the capital to lend directly to artificial intelligence infrastructure operators, utilizing underlying compute hardware rather than corporate assets as collateral. In addition to the financing, Bullish plans to list USD.AI's sUSDai token across multiple trading pairs alongside a dedicated market-making program. The arrangement builds on Bullish Capital's previous $4 million investment in USD.AI in September 2025, while USD.AI separately reported prior GPU-backed loans totaling $98.1 million and $34 million.

Advent and Stripe have abandoned their pursuit of PayPal after the payments company resisted a $53 billion acquisition offer. The consortium proposed $60.50 per share, a figure that valued the target at a steep discount to its peak 2021 pandemic valuation of roughly $360 billion. PayPal board members viewed the bid as inadequate while pointing to regulatory and financing hurdles. Block had initially joined the consortium in April before exiting prior to the final proposal. CEO Enrique Lores now faces the pressure of executing a standalone turnaround strategy that includes a corporate reorganization into three distinct units.

americanbanker.com reports that the Small Business Administration has introduced a proposed rule to overhaul its size standards, making 114,500 additional companies eligible for government-backed loans and contracting set-asides. The plan shifts the SBA's classification system from more than 1,000 six-digit NAICS designations to 338 four- and five-digit categories, while replacing annual sales metrics with employee-count thresholds in most cases. Under the new guidelines, a meat retailer with 500 employees or a fuel dealer with 1,900 workers would qualify as a small business. Lenders view the shift as an opportunity to book lucrative loans with established borrowers, though small-business owners contend the influx of larger competitors will crowd out the smallest firms. The federal government spent $793 billion on contracts in fiscal 2025, with a statutory goal of setting aside roughly 23 percent of those dollars for small businesses. Hundreds of comment letters have been filed in opposition to the redefinition, while lenders weigh whether to allocate more resources to the 7(a) loan program.

arstechnica.com reports that a federal court has ruled Kalshi's sports event contracts constitute gambling rather than financial swaps. The Commodity Futures Trading Service argued it maintains exclusive jurisdiction over prediction markets under the Commodity Exchange Act, which covers transactions dependent on contingencies with financial or economic consequences. The court rejected the argument that sports outcomes fit the statutory definition of a swap, finding that the broader interpretation lacks a limiting principle and conflicts with existing gambling statutes. Judge Nelson wrote that placing sports bets under another name remains gambling, joined by Judge Bade. Judge Lee concurred, noting that a typical sports game outcome lacks the direct financial consequence expected in a swap contract.

Marsh has launched Stratus, a $10 billion property insurance exchange built to cover the operational risks of digital infrastructure assets such as data centers. The facility provides single-placement capacity for US-domiciled companies through a structured network of 30 traditional and alternative capital providers who evaluate risks individually. This mechanism directly addresses the aggregation and capacity bottlenecks that emerge as multi-billion-dollar campuses transition from construction into live operation. Stratus extends Marsh's existing construction-phase facility, Nimbus, which offers up to $2.7 billion in limits. Global premiums for the sector are projected to expand from roughly $11 billion currently to more than $24 billion by 2030, driven largely by artificial intelligence workloads.

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