The Bitcoin Treasury landscape has evolved significantly over the past six months. In just half a year, their number has more than doubled, covering Metaplanet in Japan, oranjebtc in Brazil, and a new crop of US players such as Recently announced that working hard as well as Tether and Jack Maller’s Twenty one.
In a Conference in New York last monthThe founder of the strategy, Michael Saylor, expressed the emerging thesis: “We are in year one of the restructuring of the financial system, releasing digital securities and digital credit into digital capital.” His company’s newly completed $2.5 billion stretch has the industry buzzing, and other Treasury firms are scrambling to catch up.
The magnitude of this shift is difficult to overstate. The model’s biggest supporters suggest it could expand by orders of magnitude, competing against the trillions in underperforming credit instruments stuck in junk and corporate bonds. Bitcoin is becoming the primary collateral. Digital credit is eating away at traditional finance.
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Much of the activity sits in custodial silos, reproducing the counterparty risk that Bitcoin was designed to eliminate. Until digital capital flows through open networks, Bitcoin capital remains locked into the greatest opportunity: global, open financial markets.
The infrastructure race is underway. Traditional finance builds onchain. Defi is scaling. What’s missing is a bitcoin-native path that doesn’t compromise custody or settlement. The technology must match the asset standards for user sovereigns. 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 faces its first market test. The flywheel thesis that powered the prime movers is showing signs of fatigue. A number of Treasury companies are now trading below net asset value and premiums are significantly compressed across the board.
Pioneers like strategy or metaplanet have capitalized on a simple dynamic: raise equity at premiums to Nav (Net Asset Value)buy bitcoin, repeat. New entrants face a maturing market structure.
On stage in New York, Saylor argued that diversity is becoming critical. Thousands can succeed in serving different markets. Japanese yen investors do not compete with the Swiss Franc Markets or US Retail. Geography, product, distribution, customer segments everything.
Just accumulating Bitcoin is not enough. The winners are those who unlock its potential as productive capital.
The paradigm of digital credit
For centuries, the world ran on credit backed by gold: bonds, notes, currency collateralized by metal reserves. Treasury Company Advocates believe that Bitcoin is the digital successor to Gold and the future of credit markets.
The strategy: transform static bitcoin holdings into dynamic financial instruments that leverage the asset’s extreme volatility. Consider structured products that give investors exposure to Bitcoin without price swings. Derivatives designed to deliver compelling yields to investors long starved by the stagnation of traditional income products.
For the top Bitcoin Treasury companies, traditional equities offer a clear path to market: established distribution, regulatory clarity, and deep institutional capital. Rails are proven, and investors understand the products.
But railroads have structural constraints. Geographical boundaries restrict access. Trading hours Create latency. Settlement chains involve many intermediaries, each taking a fee and adding to the dispute. Digital assets using analog infrastructure can only move at analog speeds.
Internet Capital Markets
Inefficiencies create an opening and onchain markets fill this gap. Half a decade removed from Blockchain’s false startmainstream adoption is gaining pace. Stripes and Robinhood has announced new infrastructure projects. Coinbase’s base is established as one of the most successful Ethereum scaling solutions. Hyperliquid processes billions in weekly derivatives volume fully onchain. The issuance of StableCoin is explosive and the circulation exceeds $ 300 billion.
Onchain markets operate continuously in all time zones with no gatekeepers or account minimums. Settlement that takes days in traditional finance happens in seconds, with intermediaries settled through programmable code that executes at marginal cost. Developers can write financial primitives in new instruments and launch them at scale from anywhere.
But Bitcoin capital remains largely sidelined, held back by technical limitations. Current solutions require packaged tokens and trusted counterparts: centralized chokepoints that rebuild custodial dependencies. Bridge hacks, smart contract exploits, and custodian failures like BlockFI and FTX have resulted in billions in customer losses. More successful platforms such as Bitgo’s WBTC or CBTC fragment CBTC’s CBTC’s CBTC’s CBTC’s CBTC’s in 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.
The construction of the financial infrastructure layer
For sophisticated players, this technology will allow significant breakthroughs: continuous global markets, programmed instruments that combine fragmented liquidity, and arbitrage between traditional and onchain rails. The opportunity for Treasury companies extends beyond accumulation. In 2010, Hal Finney Foresaw “Bitcoin-backed Banks” that became the backbone of digital finance. If that vision is to materialize, the infrastructure that supports it cannot remain stuck in the 20th century.
This requires the infrastructure native to Bitcoin itself – not tokens wrapped around alternative chains, not custodial bridges that redraw intermediaries, not systems where “programmability” means trusting a multisig federation. It should maintain the main characteristics of Bitcoin: The guarantee of self-custody and settlement is guaranteed anchored in the base layer. Contributing to this layer can change from simple Treasury operators to financial infrastructure providers. This foundation creates economic platforms beyond the property itself, opening distribution channels, developing transaction flow fees, and establishing railroads that define how capital moves.
The Treasury Gold Rush is on. Who will sell the shovels?
