Institutional attitudes toward bitcoin dividends are beginning to shift, and there is now renewed interest in BTC rewards after years of skepticism fueled by smart-contract risk, leverage and opaque strategies, GlobalStake co-founder Thomas Chaffee told CoinDesk on Thursday.
Products that allow users to earn a return on their bitcoin holdings often require BTC to be wrapped in protocols that involve smart contract risk or strategies that don’t scale, so institutions don’t see “a risk-return profile that made sense,” according to Chaffee.
That aversion is starting to change, Chaffee said, not because institutions suddenly want more risk, but because the types of strategies available to them have evolved. Instead of protocol-based returns or token incentives, allocators are increasingly gravitating toward fully collateralized, market-neutral approaches that resemble traditional financial strategies already familiar to hedge funds and government bonds, he said.
“The behavioral change we’re seeing is not institutions chasing dividends,” Chaffee said. “These are institutions that finally engage when the strategies, controls and infrastructure look like something they can actually capitalize on at scale.”
The renewed interest comes after years of failed or short-lived attempts to generate returns on bitcoin, many of which were exposed during the 2022 market downturn, when prominent lenders froze withdrawals and ultimately collapsed amid liquidity stress, notably when crypto-lending service Celsius Network indefinitely paused withdrawals and transfers amid “market conditions and transfers”’20. later went bankrupt.
Chaffee isn’t the only one seeing renewed institutional interest in bitcoin dividends. “People who hold bitcoin — whether on the balance sheet or as investors — increasingly see it as a pot that’s just sitting there,” Richard Green, director of Rootstock Institutional, told CoinDesk recently. “It can’t just sit there and do nothing; it has to add value.” Green said professional investors now want their digital assets to “work as hard as possible” within their risk mandates.
Chaffee explained that GlobalStake, which provides staking infrastructure across proof-of-stake networks, began hearing the same question repeatedly from clients over the past several years: whether similar institutional-grade return opportunities existed for bitcoin.
GlobalStake on Thursday unveiled its Bitcoin Yield Gateway, a platform designed to bring together multiple third-party bitcoin yield strategies behind a single onboarding, compliance and integration layer.
The co-founder explained that the company expects about $500 million in bitcoin to be awarded within three months. “We expect that bitcoin will be allocated during the gateway’s first quarter rollout period, sourced from a custodian partner based in Canada, demand generated by parties through our partner MG Stover and our clients, which include family offices, digital asset treasuries (DATs), corporate treasuries and hedge funds.”
Other companies approach the problem from the infrastructure layer. Babylon Labs, for example, is developing systems that allow native bitcoin to be used as non-custodial security across financial applications, an effort aimed at expanding BTC’s utility rather than generating direct returns.
