Crypto Treasury companies that store tokens could develop from speculative wraps to long-term economic engines to blockchains, Syncracy Capital co-founder Ryan Watkins argues.
Companies in Digital Aktiv (DAT) are listed companies that raise capital to acquire and manage crypto on their balance.
In a 23rd September blog post and an accompanying thread on X, Watkins said dats already have approx. $ 105 billion in assets across Bitcoin, Ether and other majors, a scale that few market participants have fully considered.
His core use: A small number of these companies can mature to durable operators who help finance, manage and build within the networks whose tokens they have.
In addition to speculation
Watkins said the most attention is fixed on the almost term trade dynamics prizes for net worth, fundraising messages and “What is the next token”-which misses the larger bow.
“We can imagine that Select Dats will be pre-profit, listed colleagues to the Crypto Foundations, but with wider mandates to deploy capital, run businesses and participate in governance,” he wrote.
Because some dats are already checking meaningful slices of token supply, their treasuries may be more than vaults; They can be political and product handles in ecosystems.
He pointed to crypto-native examples where scale matters: on Solana, RPC providers and proprietary market manufacturers that put more sun can improve transaction landing and spread capture; At Hyperliquid, front ends that stick more hype, lower user fees or increase, take rates without raising costs.
Access to large, permanent pools of native assets can help such companies with bootstrap and scale, he said.
Programmable money, productive balance
Watkins contrasted these plays with Microstrateys only Bitcoin strategy, which is largely about capital structure around a non-programmable asset.
He continued to say that by comparison, tokens on smart contract platform-eth, sun, hyp-are programmable and can be set to work on-chain.
DATS that hold them can be included for fees, provide liquidity, borrow, participate in governance and acquire “ecosystem primitives” such as validators, RPC nodes or indexers, transform treasuries into dividend-generating balance.
Structurally, he compared to win dats with a hybrid of well -known models: the permanent capital of closed funds and reits, the balancing orientation of banks and the compound ethos of Berkshire Hathaway.
What makes them different, he said, is that the returner accrues in crypto per day. Share rather than through management fees, making the vehicles closer to clean plays on underlying networks than traditional asset conductors.
He argued that tools such as common equity, convertible and preferred give DAT’s flexible funding to expand balance, while yields on the chain can help manage this funding over time.
Winners – and risks
Watkins warned that “not all dats will handle it.”
He expects many first generation of vehicles to be heavy on financial technology and light on operational material fading when conditions are normalized. As competition intensifies, he expects consolidation, experiments with more exotic funding and sometimes reckless balance sheet if the prizes turn to discounts and pressure buildings.
In his view, the survivors will be those who pair disciplined capital allocation with operating pots, recycling of cash flows for token accumulation, product building and ecosystem expansion. “Over time, the best -controlled could develop into Berkshire Hathaways of their blockchains,” he wrote.
