The days of buying Bitcoin and calling it a financial strategy are over.
By early 2026, more than 200 public companies held digital assets on their balance sheets, collectively managing more than $115 billion (DLA Piper, October 2025). By September 2025, these companies will have a combined market capitalization of approximately $150 billion, a nearly fourfold increase from the previous year. However, some of these companies are now trading below the value of their holdings. The market is sending a clear signal: Accumulation alone is no longer enough.
Investors want to see capital discipline and financial returns. Management teams have responded with stock buyback programs and transparency metrics such as “Bitcoin per share” designed to show the value added to the vault beyond the token price (AMINA Bank Research, 2026). The shift from passive accumulation to active income generation – from “DAT 1.0” to “DAT 2.0” – is now a defining theme in the industry.
Three main models are emerging. Each has different risk-reward characteristics and imposes different requirements on governance, technical capabilities and infrastructure.
Infrastructure participation and staking
The most protocol-native approach involves staking tokens to support network consensus and earning rewards in return. For Bitcoin-centric treasuries, this increasingly extends to the Lightning Network and other native infrastructure that generate routing and liquidity fees. Staking requires careful analysis of technical security and smart contract risks.
The numbers are growing rapidly. Bitmine Immersion Technologies reported that by early 2026, more than 3 million ETH had been staked, with total holdings of $9.9 billion and annualized staking revenue of approximately $172 million (SEC filing, March 2026). Its proprietary validator network slightly outperforms the combined Ethereum staking rate, demonstrating the advantages that institutional-grade infrastructure can provide even in a protocol-grade yield environment.
SharpLink Gaming deployed $200 million in ETH to rehost infrastructure via EigenCloud, aiming to increase revenue by securing applications ranging from artificial intelligence workloads to authentication (SEC Filing, 2025). Re-staking – ETH already staked is used to secure additional services and is carefully governed.
Active trading and market-driven revenue
The second group of strategies exploits market structures—financing rate arbitrage, basis trades, and option premiums. These measures can be effective and are often market neutral, but they require trading expertise, strong risk controls and around-the-clock monitoring. Governance makes sense: This approach effectively transforms the finance function into a transactional business. As with any trading function, the skilled staff needed to monitor complex positions and associated risks can be difficult to find.
One prominent Japanese public company illustrates its potential and complexity. As of the end of 2025, it held more than 35,000 BTC, generated the equivalent of approximately $55 million in Bitcoin revenue through options-based strategies, and experienced operating profit growth of more than 1,600% year-on-year. However, the same company recorded a huge net loss due to non-cash mark-to-market revaluation under local accounting standards (TradingView; Kavout, 2026). For investors, this disconnect between operating cash flow and reported earnings makes assessment more difficult and underscores why governance and transparency are as important as overall returns.
Galaxy Digital offers a contrasting hybrid model, combining its own library of digital assets with institutional services such as mortgage lending, strategic advisory and infrastructure. In the third quarter of 2025, Galaxy’s adjusted gross profit hit a record high, exceeding $730 million (Mint Ventures Research, 2025). Notably, the company has diversified its revenue streams beyond pure cryptocurrencies by repurposing its Helios mining facility into an artificial intelligence computing campus secured by long-term contracts—suggesting that the most resilient Treasury bonds may be those that generate revenue from multiple uncorrelated sources.
Credit allocation and net interest margin
The third route views digital assets as productive balance sheet capital. The model involves lending against cryptoassets on a non-recourse basis, obtaining stablecoin liquidity, and deploying it into higher-yielding private credit. It retains long-term exposure to the underlying assets while generating recurring interest income from short-term real economy loans. The strategy requires particular expertise in yield, credit risk and fixed income.
These mechanisms are borrowed directly from traditional banking: liquidity management, underwriting, governance and control leverage. Under this model, a company purchases Bitcoin, borrows against those assets on a non-recourse basis (meaning the downside is limited to the collateral), and allocates the resulting funds into a diversified private credit portfolio that supports lending to the real economy. If Bitcoin appreciates, the company will retain upside after repaying the loan, combining potential capital gains with recurring interest income.
For credit deployment models to work reliably, they need to be rooted in operational financial infrastructure rather than being built from scratch. This approach is most effective when it extends from an existing platform with real lending relationships and established customer accounts. Greenage believes this is also an area where governance and due diligence frameworks are particularly important, as capital is being deployed into third-party credit opportunities that must be assessed on a counterparty-by-counterparty basis.
The success of this model is also related to the maturity of stablecoins as institutional infrastructure. By 2026, stablecoins will support enterprises’ cross-border payments, real-time settlement, and T+0 clearing (same-day settlement) (Foley & Lardner, January 2026). Coinbase Institution predicts that the total market value of stablecoins may reach US$1.2 trillion by 2028 (Coinbase Institution, August 2025). For credit deployment strategies, stablecoins provide a good medium for capital deployment in the lending market.
A new measure of maturity
Recent market conditions have reinforced a simple fact: price appreciation alone is not a financial strategy. The growing range of revenue solutions reflects an industry learning from its own history—sustainable revenue generation makes digital assets a more productive part of corporate balance sheets.
No single model is certain. The most effective treasuries will blend approaches based on risk appetite, operational capabilities and governance structures. But the direction of travel is clear. Passive holding is no longer enough to justify a digital asset’s place on the balance sheet. Yield is becoming a core measure of funding maturity and a central factor in how the market evaluates companies with exposure to digital assets.
The winners of the next phase will not be the largest holders. They will be the most disciplined operators.
Important notice:
This article has been prepared by Greengage & Co. Limited for information and thought leadership purposes only. It is intended for use by businesses, professional counterparties and institutional market participants only and is not targeted at retail consumers. It does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, financial promotion, or a recommendation or inducement to buy, sell or hold any asset, security or financial instrument.
Digital assets are subject to significant price fluctuations and regulatory changes. Past performance is not indicative of future results. All investing carries risks, including potential loss of capital. The forward-looking statements and market forecasts cited in this article are derived from third-party research and do not represent the views or forecasts of Greengage & Co. Limited.
Greengage & Co. Limited is not authorized or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority to carry out investment business. Greengage acts solely as an introducer to independent third-party service providers and does not arrange investments, provide loans, custody or investment management services.
Readers should seek independent professional advice before making any investment decisions.
