The Bitcoin treasury landscape has evolved dramatically over the past six months. In just half a year, their number has more than doubled, spanning MetaPlanet in Japan, OranjeBTC in Brazil, and a new crop of U.S. players like 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’re in year one of reinventing the finance system, issuing digital securities and digital credit on digital capital.” His company’s newly-completed $2.5 billion Stretch IPO has the industry buzzing, and other treasury companies are now scrambling to catch up.
The scale of this shift is hard to overstate. The model’s biggest backers suggest it could expand by orders of magnitude, competing against the trillions in underperforming credit instruments stuck in junk and corporate bonds. Bitcoin becomes premier collateral. Digital credit eats traditional finance.
Or does it?
Most activity sits in custodial silos, reintroducing the counterparty risk Bitcoin was designed to eliminate. Until digital capital flows natively through open networks, Bitcoin capital remains locked out of the largest opportunity: global, open financial markets.
The infrastructure race is already underway. Traditional finance is building onchain. DeFi is scaling. What’s missing is a Bitcoin-native path that doesn’t compromise on custody or settlement. The technology must match the asset’s standards for user sovereignty.Treasury companies that support this development early can gain an edge in an increasingly competitive market.
The flywheel faces headwinds
Despite the industry’s momentum, the treasury model is facing its first market test. The flywheel thesis that powered initial movers is showing signs of exhaustion. A number of treasury companies now trade below net asset value and premiums have significantly compressed across the board.
Pioneers like Strategy or Metaplanet capitalized on a simple dynamic: raise equity at premiums to NAV (Net Asset Value), buy Bitcoin, repeat. New entrants are facing a maturing market structure.
On stage in New York, Saylor argued that differentiation becomes critical. Thousands can succeed serving different markets. Japanese yen investors don’t compete with Swiss franc markets or U.S. retail. Geography, products, distribution, customer segments all matter.
Simply accumulating Bitcoin won’t 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 collateralized by metallic reserves. Treasury company advocates believe Bitcoin is gold’s digital successor and the future of credit markets.
The strategy: transform static Bitcoin holdings into dynamic financial instruments that leverage the asset’s infamous volatility. Think structured products that give investors Bitcoin exposure without the price swings. Derivatives designed to deliver compelling yields to investors long starved by the stagnation of traditional fixed-income products.
For upstart bitcoin treasury companies, traditional equities 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 come with structural constraints. Geographic boundaries restrict access. Trading hours create latency. Settlement chains involve multiple intermediaries, each extracting fees and adding friction. Digital assets using analog infrastructure can only move at analog speed.
Internet capital markets
Those inefficiencies create an opening and onchain markets are filling this gap. Half a decade removed from blockchain’s false start, mainstream adoption is picking up pace. 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 derivatives volume entirely onchain. Stablecoin issuance is exploding and circulation now exceeds $300 billion.
Onchain markets operate continuously across all time zones without 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.
Yet Bitcoin capital remains largely sidelined, held back by technical limitations. Current solutions require wrapped tokens and trusted counterparties: centralized chokepoints that reintroduce custodial 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 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 breakthroughs: continuous global markets, programmable instruments unifying fragmented liquidity, and arbitrage between traditional and onchain rails.The opportunity for treasury companies extends far beyond accumulation. In 2010, Hal Finney foresaw “Bitcoin-backed banks” becoming the backbone of digital finance. If that vision is to materialize, the infrastructure supporting it cannot remain stuck in the 20th century.
It demands infrastructure native to Bitcoin itself — not wrapped tokens on alternative chains, not custodial bridges that reintroduce intermediaries, not systems where “programmability” means trusting a multisig federation. It must preserve Bitcoin’s core properties: self-custody and settlement guarantees anchored to the base layer.Contributing to this layer can transform from simple treasury operators into financial infrastructure providers. This foundation creates platform economics 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 on. Who will sell the shovels?
