Nexo returned to the U.S. with Bakkt-backed crypto services

Nexo announced a formal return to the United States on February 16, 2026, relaunching yield programs, an exchange, crypto-backed credit lines and a loyalty program after withdrawing from the market following a federal and state enforcement settlement.

The company said its new U.S. offering would operate through regulated partners and that Bakkt would supply digital-asset trading infrastructure. That made the announcement more than a geographic expansion: it was a test of whether a centralized crypto lender could re-enter the country with products carrying familiar labels but a different claimed compliance structure.

Four products returned under a new framework

Nexo’s February 16 announcement identified Flexible and Fixed-term Yield programs, an integrated exchange, crypto-backed credit lines, and a loyalty program. It also said customers could use automated clearing house transfers and wires for fiat on- and off-ramps. Nexo described the yield products as investment structures administered within a regulated framework and said Bakkt provided trading infrastructure.

Those were the company’s contemporaneous claims. The announcement did not identify every legal entity providing each product, publish the governing registrations for the yield structures, or establish that every service was available in every U.S. jurisdiction. Bakkt’s role was specifically described as trading infrastructure; the event-day record did not show that Bakkt operated the yield or credit products.

That distinction matters because product names do not determine regulatory treatment. A yield account, loan and spot-trading interface can sit under different statutes, licenses and customer protections even when presented in one application. The February 16 development was therefore a launch and structural claim, not a blanket regulatory approval of Nexo or its full product suite.

The 2023 settlement defined the stakes

On January 19, 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission found that Nexo Capital’s earlier Earn Interest Product was offered and sold as an unregistered security. Nexo settled without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings, accepted a cease-and-desist order and agreed to pay a $22.5 million SEC penalty. Parallel state settlements added $22.5 million, bringing announced penalties to $45 million.

The SEC order recorded that the earlier product had approximately 112,000 U.S. investors and $2.7 billion in U.S. investor assets as of March 2022. Those figures describe the historical Earn Interest Product at that measurement point; they are not February 2026 customer or asset totals. The order also said Nexo would end that product for all U.S. investors by April 1, 2023 and exit the country shortly afterward.

The earlier model involved customers transferring crypto assets to Nexo, which pooled and deployed them across lending, staking, trading and other activities at its discretion. Nexo’s February 16 announcement used similar Flexible and Fixed-term Yield labels, but the surviving event-day materials did not provide enough contractual detail to conclude that the new structures had the same economics or legal form. Treating them as identical would go beyond the record.

Later confirmation, kept separate

On February 17, 2026, Bakkt confirmed the partnership and said Nexo would use its U.S. trading infrastructure. Bakkt pointed to its money-transmitter coverage and New York BitLicense in describing that infrastructure. This next-day statement corroborated the trading relationship, but it did not independently validate Nexo’s separate yield and credit arrangements.

The significance on February 16 was the re-entry itself. A company that had agreed to leave the United States after a major crypto-lending registration case was again offering exchange, credit and yield services, this time through a partner-based architecture. Whether that architecture supplied durable compliance could not be determined from the launch announcement alone; what could be verified was that centralized crypto finance was attempting an institutional return through licensed infrastructure rather than simply reviving the old product unchanged.