Bitcoin’s treasury landscape has evolved dramatically over the past six months. In just half a year, their numbers have more than doubled, spanning MetaPlanet in Japan, OranjeBTC in Brazil, and a new crop of American players such as the recently announced Strive as well as Tether and Jack Maller’s Twenty One.
At a conference in New York last month, Strategy founder Michael Saylor formulated the new thesis: “We are in year one of reinventing the financial system, issuing digital securities and digital credit on digital capital.” His company’s recent $2.5 billion Stretch IPO has sent ripples through the industry, and other financial firms are now scrambling to catch up.
This op-ed is part of CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Treasuries Theme Week, sponsored by Genius Group.
The magnitude of this shift is hard to overstate. The model’s biggest backers suggest it can expand by orders of magnitude and compete against the trillions in underperforming credit instruments stuck in junk and corporate bonds. Bitcoin becomes leading security. Digital credit is eating traditional finance.
Or does it?
Most of the activity takes place in custody silos, reintroducing the counterparty risk that Bitcoin was designed to eliminate. Until digital capital flows natively through open networks, Bitcoin capital remains locked out of the biggest opportunity: global, open financial markets.
The infrastructure race is already underway. Traditional finance is based on the chain. DeFi is scaling. What’s missing is a Bitcoin-native path that doesn’t compromise custody or settlement. The technology must match the asset’s standards for user sovereignty. Treasury companies that support this development early can gain a head start in an increasingly competitive market.
The flywheel faces the wind
Despite the industry’s momentum, the financial model faces its first market test. The flywheel that powered the first movers is showing signs of exhaustion. A number of treasury companies are now trading below net asset value, and premiums have been significantly squeezed across the board.
Pioneers like Strategy or Metaplanet exploited a simple dynamic: raise equity at premiums to NAV (Net Asset Value), buy Bitcoin, repeat. New players face a maturing market structure.
On stage in New York, Saylor argued that differentiation becomes critical. Thousands can be successful serving different markets. Japanese yen investors do not compete with markets in Swiss francs or US retail. Geography, products, distribution, customer segments all matter.
Simply accumulating Bitcoin will not be enough. The winners will be those who unlock its potential as productive capital.
The digital credit paradigm
For centuries the world ran on gold-backed credit: bonds, notes, currencies backed by metallic reserves. Proponents of financial corporations believe that Bitcoin is the digital successor of gold and the future of credit markets.
The strategy: transform static Bitcoin holdings into dynamic financial instruments that take advantage of the asset’s notorious volatility. Think structured products that give investors Bitcoin exposure without price fluctuations. Derivatives designed to deliver compelling returns to investors long starved by the stagnation of traditional fixed income products.
For emerging bitcoin tax companies, traditional stocks offer an obvious path to market: established distribution, regulatory clarity and deep institutional capital. The rails are proven and investors understand the products.
But these rails come with structural limitations. Geographical boundaries limit access. Trading hours create latency. Settlement chains involve multiple intermediaries, each deducting fees and adding friction. Digital assets using analog infrastructure can only move at analog speed.
Internet capital markets
These inefficiencies create an opening, and onchain markets fill this gap. Half a decade removed from blockchain’s false start, mainstream adoption is gaining momentum. Stripe and Robinhood have announced new infrastructure projects. Coinbase’s Base is established as one of Ethereum’s most successful scaling solutions. Hyperliquid processes billions in weekly derivative volume all the way up the chain. Stablecoin issuance is exploding, with circulation now exceeding $300 billion.
Onchain markets operate continuously across all time zones with no gatekeepers or account minimums. Settlement that takes days in traditional finance happens in seconds, with intermediaries coordinated through programmable code executed at marginal cost. Developers can assemble financial primitives into new instruments and launch them at scale from anywhere.
Yet Bitcoin capital remains largely on the sidelines, held back by technical limitations. Current solutions require wrapped tokens and trusted counterparties: centralized choke points that reintroduce custody dependencies. Bridge hacks, smart contract exploits and custodian failures like BlockFi and FTX have resulted in billions in customer losses. More successful platforms like BitGo’s wBTC or Coinbase’s cBTC fragment Bitcoin’s network effect across incompatible systems.
Despite its promise, DeFi still carries counterparty risks that make it unsuitable for companies managing billions in Bitcoin reserves. Security remains the missing link between static security and dynamic capital markets.
Construction of the financial infrastructure layer
For sophisticated players, this technology will enable significant breakthroughs: continuous global markets, programmable instruments that unify fragmented liquidity, and arbitrage between traditional and onchain rails. The opportunity for treasury companies extends far beyond accumulation. In 2010, Hal Finney predicted that “Bitcoin-backed banks” would become the backbone of digital finance. If this vision is to be realized, the infrastructure that supports it cannot remain stuck in the 20th century.
It requires infrastructure native to Bitcoin itself—not wrapped tokens on alternate chains, not custodian bridges that reintroduce intermediaries, not systems where “programmability” means trusting a multisig federation. It must preserve Bitcoin’s core features: self-storage and settlement guarantees anchored to the base layer. Contributing to this layer can transform from simple treasury operators to financial infrastructure providers. This foundation creates platform economics beyond the asset itself, opens distribution channels, generates fees on transaction flow, and establishes the rails that define how capital moves.
The Treasury’s gold rush is underway. Who will sell the shovels?
