The Bitcoin cash landscape has evolved significantly over the past six months. In just six months, their numbers have more than doubled, spanning MetaPlanet in Japan, OranjeBTC in Brazil and a new generation of US 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, of issuing digital securities and digital credit on digital capital. » His company’s new $2.5 billion Stretch IPO has rocked the industry, and other treasury companies are now scrambling to catch up.
It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of this change. The model’s biggest proponents suggest it could grow by orders of magnitude, competing with the trillions in underperforming credit instruments stuck in junk and corporate bonds. Bitcoin becomes the first collateral. Digital credit is devouring traditional finance.
Or is it?
Most activity takes place in custody silos, reintroducing the counterparty risk that Bitcoin was designed to eliminate. Until digital capital flows natively through open networks, Bitcoin capital remains excluded from the greatest opportunity: global, open financial markets.
The infrastructure race is already on. Traditional finance is built on a chain. DeFi is evolving. 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 is facing its first market test. The flywheel thesis that propelled the first actors shows signs of exhaustion. A number of cash companies are now trading below NAV and premiums have fallen significantly across the board.
Pioneers like Strategy or Metaplanet capitalized on a simple dynamic: raise equity at a premium to Net Asset Value, buy Bitcoin, repeat. New entrants are faced with a maturing market structure.
On stage in New York, Saylor argued that differentiation was becoming essential. Thousands of people can successfully serve different markets. Investors in Japanese yen do not compete with Swiss franc markets or U.S. retail trading. Geography, products, distribution and customer segments all matter.
Simply accumulating Bitcoin will not be enough. The winners will be those who unlock its potential as productive capital.
The digital credit paradigm
For centuries, the world functioned thanks to credits backed by gold: bonds, notes, currencies guaranteed by metallic reserves. Defenders of Treasury companies 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 exploit the asset’s famous volatility. Consider structured products that offer investors exposure to Bitcoin without the price fluctuations. Derivatives designed to offer attractive returns to investors long starved by the stagnation of traditional fixed income products.
For new Bitcoin treasury companies, traditional stocks offer an obvious path to market: established distribution, clear regulation, and significant institutional capital. The rails are proven and investors understand the products.
But these rails have 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
These inefficiencies create an opening and blockchain markets fill this gap. Half a decade after blockchain’s false start, mainstream adoption is accelerating. Stripe and Robinhood announced new infrastructure projects. Coinbase is established as one of Ethereum’s most successful scaling solutions. Hyperliquid processes billions in weekly derivatives volumes entirely on-chain. Stablecoin issuance is exploding and circulation now exceeds $300 billion.
On-chain markets operate continuously across all time zones, without controllers or account minimums. Settlement that takes days in traditional finance happens in seconds, with intermediaries coordinated via 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 marginalized, held back by technical limitations. Current solutions require wrapped tokens and trusted counterparties: centralized choke points that reintroduce custody dependencies. Bridge hacks, smart contract exploits, and custodian failures like BlockFi and FTX have led to billions in customer losses. Higher performance platforms such as BitGo’s wBTC or Coinbase’s cBTC fragment Bitcoin’s network effect on incompatible systems.
Despite its promises, DeFi still carries counterparty risks that make it unsuitable for companies managing billions of Bitcoin reserves. Security remains the missing link between static guarantees and dynamic capital markets.
Building the financial infrastructure layer
For sophisticated players, this technology will enable significant advancements: seamless global markets, programmable instruments unifying fragmented liquidity, and arbitrage between traditional and on-chain rails. The opportunity for treasury companies extends well beyond accumulation. In 2010, Hal Finney predicted that “Bitcoin-backed banks” would become the backbone of digital finance. If this vision is to come to fruition, the infrastructure that supports it cannot remain stuck in the 20th century.
This requires infrastructure native to Bitcoin itself – no tokens wrapped in alternative chains, no custody bridges that reintroduce intermediaries, no systems where “programmability” means trusting a multisig federation. It must preserve the fundamental properties of Bitcoin: self-preservation 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 flows, and establishing the rails that define how capital flows.
The Treasury gold rush is on. Who will sell the shovels?
