“The era of buying bitcoin and calling it a treasury strategy is over.”
That blunt assessment now has hard numbers to back it up. By early 2026, more than 200 publicly listed companies held digital assets on their balance sheets, managing over $115 billion in aggregate (DLA Piper, Oct 2025). The combined market cap of those firms hit roughly $150 billion by September 2025—a nearly fourfold jump year-over-year—but many still trade below the value of their own crypto holdings. The message from markets is clear: accumulation alone won’t cut it.
Investors now expect capital discipline and demonstrable economic return. Management teams have reacted with buyback programs and new transparency metrics—like “BTC per share”—to show how treasury holdings add value beyond token price moves (AMINA Bank Research, 2026). The sector is undergoing a transition from passive hoarding (“DAT 1.0”) to active yield generation (“DAT 2.0”). Three distinct treasury models are emerging, each with different risk/return trade-offs and governance demands.
1) Protocol-native yield
- What it is: Using tokens to support network functions—staking, validating, or participating in native infrastructure such as Lightning routing—to earn protocol-level rewards and fees.
- Why it matters: Institutional-grade infrastructure can boost returns and reduce slippage or downtime risk.
- Example: Bitmine Immersion Technologies reported over 3 million staked ETH by early 2026, total holdings of $9.9 billion and annualized staking revenue of about $172 million; its validator network slightly outperformed the Composite Ethereum Staking Rate (SEC filing, Mar 2026).
- Advanced variant: Restaking—where staked ETH is used to secure additional services—has been pursued by firms like SharpLink Gaming, which deployed $200 million via EigenCloud to capture higher yields across applications from AI to identity (SEC filing, 2025).
- Key risks: technical security, smart-contract exposure and governance of staking/validator operations.
2) Market-driven income (active trading)
- What it is: Using trading strategies—funding-rate arbitrage, basis trades, options-writing—to generate cash income, often market-neutral in intent.
- Why it matters: These strategies can turn a treasury into a revenue-generating desk, but they require specialized trading expertise and tight risk controls.
- Example: A major Japanese listed firm holding ~35,000 BTC generated the equivalent of ~$55 million in bitcoin income via option strategies and posted operating profit growth >1,600% YoY—yet ended up with a large net loss owing to mark-to-market accounting effects under local rules (TradingView; Kavout, 2026). That gap highlights how reported earnings can diverge from cash profitability.
- Key risks: staffing, around-the-clock monitoring, model and correlation risk, and accounting complexities.
3) Productive balance-sheet capital (credit deployment)
- What it is: Borrowing against crypto collateral on a non-recourse basis to obtain stablecoin liquidity, then deploying that liquidity into short-duration private credit and other yield-bearing real-economy lending.
- Why it matters: Preserves upside exposure to the underlying crypto while producing recurring interest income—if executed on sound underwriting and liquidity-management frameworks.
- Operational needs: banking-style infrastructure, credit underwriting expertise, governance and third-party due diligence.
- Why stablecoins matter: As institutional rails, stablecoins are enabling faster settlement and cross-border flows. Projections have posited stablecoin market caps expanding to as much as $1.2 trillion by 2028 (Coinbase Institutional, Aug 2025), which would boost the viability of credit-deployment strategies.
- Key risks: credit and counterparty risk, leverage management, and dependence on mature stablecoin infrastructure.
Hybrid approaches are already proving resilient. Galaxy Digital combines its treasury with institutional services—collateralized lending, advisory, infrastructure—and in Q3 2025 posted record adjusted gross profit north of $730 million (Mint Ventures Research, 2025). It even repurposed its Helios mining campus into contracted AI compute capacity, underlining how diversified, uncorrelated income streams can strengthen a treasury.
The takeaways
- Price appreciation no longer qualifies as a treasury strategy. Markets now price in whether crypto holdings generate real, sustainable yield.
- No single model is a silver bullet. The best outcomes will likely come from hybrid strategies calibrated to a firm’s governance, operational capability and risk appetite.
- Governance, transparency and institutional-grade infrastructure are decisive. The winners won’t necessarily be the biggest holders but the most disciplined operators.
Important notice (condensed)
This piece was prepared by Greengage & Co. Limited for institutional and professional audiences and is for informational purposes only. It is not financial or investment advice. Digital assets carry significant volatility and regulatory risk; past performance is no guarantee of future results. Readers should seek independent professional advice before making investment decisions. Greengage is not FCA-authorized for investment business and does not provide custody, lending, or investment management services.
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