The Bitcoin treasury landscape has evolved dramatically over the past six months. In just half a year, their numbers have more than doubled, encompassing MetaPlanet in Japan, OranjeBTC in Brazil, and a new generation of American players like 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 articulated the emerging thesis: “We are in the first year of reinventing the financial system, issuing digital securities and digital credit on digital capital.” Stretch’s just-completed $2.5 billion IPO of his company has the industry on edge, and other treasury companies are now scrambling to catch up.
It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of this change. The model’s biggest supporters suggest it could expand by orders of magnitude, competing against the trillions of low-yielding credit instruments trapped in junk and corporate bonds. Bitcoin becomes the main guarantee. Digital credit eats away at traditional finance.
Or not?
Most activity is in custody silos, reintroducing the counterparty risk that Bitcoin was designed to eliminate. Until digital capital flows natively across open networks, Bitcoin capital will remain excluded from the biggest opportunity: open, global financial markets.
The race for infrastructure is already underway. Traditional finance is being built on a chain. DeFi is scaling. What’s missing is a native Bitcoin 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 from the beginning can gain an advantage in an increasingly competitive market.
The steering wheel faces headwinds
Despite industry momentum, the treasury model faces its first market test. The flywheel thesis that powered the initial boosters is showing signs of exhaustion. Several treasury companies are now trading below net asset value and premiums have compressed significantly across the board.
Pioneers like Strategy or Metaplanet capitalized on a simple dynamic: increase capital with premiums to NAV (Net Asset Value), buy Bitcoin, repeat. New entrants face a maturing market structure.
In the New York setting, Saylor argued that differentiation becomes critical. Thousands can be successful serving different markets. Japanese yen investors do not compete with Swiss franc markets or US retail trading. Geography, products, distribution and customer segments are important.
Simply accumulating Bitcoin will not be enough. The winners will be those who unleash their potential as productive capital.
The digital credit paradigm
For centuries, the world ran on credit backed by gold: bonds, notes, and currencies secured by metallic reserves. Treasury advocates believe Bitcoin is the digital successor to gold and the future of credit markets.
The strategy: transform static Bitcoin holdings into dynamic financial instruments that take advantage of the asset’s infamous volatility. Think about structured products that give investors exposure to Bitcoin without price swings. Derivatives designed to offer attractive returns to investors who have long been starved by the stagnation of traditional fixed income products.
For bitcoin treasury startups, 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 those rails have structural limitations. Geographic boundaries restrict access. Trading hours create latency. Settlement chains involve multiple intermediaries, each of which charges fees and adds friction. Digital assets that use analog infrastructure can only move at analog speed.
Internet capital markets
These inefficiencies create an opening and chain markets are filling this gap. Half a decade after blockchain’s false start, widespread adoption is picking up pace. Stripe and Robinhood have announced new infrastructure projects. Coinbase Base establishes itself as one of the most successful Ethereum scaling solutions. Hyperliquid processes billions in weekly derivatives volume completely on-chain. Stablecoin issuance is skyrocketing and circulation now exceeds $300 billion.
On-chain 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 that executes at marginal cost. Developers can compose financial primitives into new instruments and launch them at scale from anywhere.
However, Bitcoin capital remains largely sidelined, held back by technical limitations. Current solutions require wrapped tokens and trusted counterparties – centralized control points that reintroduce custodial dependencies. Bridge hacks, smart contract exploits, and failures of custodians like BlockFi and FTX have led to billions of customer losses. More successful platforms like BitGo’s wBTC or Coinbase’s cBTC fragment Bitcoin’s network effect into incompatible systems.
Despite its promises, DeFi still carries counterparty risks that make it unsuitable for companies managing billions in Bitcoin reserves. Security remains the missing link between static collateral and dynamic capital markets.
Building the financial infrastructure layer
For sophisticated players, this technology will enable significant advancements: continuous global markets, programmable instruments that unify fragmented liquidity, and arbitrage between traditional and on-chain rails. The opportunity for treasury companies extends far beyond accrual. In 2010, Hal Finney foresaw that “Bitcoin-backed banks” would become the backbone of digital finance. For that vision to materialize, the infrastructure that supports it cannot remain stagnant in the 20th century.
It demands an infrastructure native to Bitcoin itself: no tokens wrapped in alternative chains, no escrow bridges that reintroduce intermediaries, no systems where “programmability” means relying on a multi-signature federation. It must preserve the fundamental properties of Bitcoin: self-custody and settlement guarantees anchored to the base layer. Contributing to this layer can transform simple treasury operators into financial infrastructure providers. This foundation creates a platform economy beyond the asset itself, opening distribution channels, generating fees on transaction flow, and establishing the rails that define how capital moves.
The Treasury gold rush is underway. Who will sell the shovels?
