Gold-plated financial engineering has been a wild hit on Wall Street thus far. However, no matter how ornate the treasure chest of digital gold may be, it is still effectively just a vault. Even if holding Bitcoin is the trade of the century, when your ultimate value proposition is simply holding Bitcoin, differentiation becomes dubious. As more firms adopt similar acquisition strategies and leverage profiles, differentiation is becoming more challenging, creating an opportunity for those who innovate beyond the current playbook.

To see where Bitcoin strategy is headed, it’s worth taking a look at the company that redefined the corporate treasury playbook: Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy). Its outsized success is impossible to ignore. Over the past five years, its shares have climbed more than 3,000%, driven by the accumulation of 582,000 BTC, which represents almost three percent of the total supply. By prioritizing Bitcoin above all else, CEO Michael Saylor appeared to build the de facto Bitcoin ETF before spot ETFs were even approved. However, that framing wholly misses the mark.

In essence, Bitcoin treasury companies are each crafting their own treasure chest to store digital gold. They come in different shapes and sizes, some more ornate than others, and many are melting down portions of their gold to plate the chest itself.

Bitcoin Bitcoin (btc 0.52%) Bitcoin treasury companies are underutilizing their Bitcoin. For now, that’s acceptable. Public markets are hungry for Bitcoin exposure beyond spot, fueling the rise of companies that collectively hold over 800,000 Bitcoin, worth approximately $100 billion. But this era of passive accumulation won’t last. To reach the next level, these firms would benefit from evolving beyond basic HODL optimization.

Over the first half of 2025, it became clear that Saylor was a step ahead. He was not filling the gap left by the lack of Bitcoin ETFs. He was providing the public markets with something more ambitious: levered exposure through financial engineering and a flywheel only made possible by Bitcoin. Saylor brought credibly bottomless demand to an asset with absolute scarcity.

Saylor’s urgency is contagious. Following ETF approval and the Strategy’s continued boom, a wave of companies, including MetaPlanet, Twenty One, Nakamoto, Matador, Strive, ProCap, and dozens of others, started to build their own version of the Bitcoin treasury playbook. They are using the same public market demand for supra-spot BTC exposure to subsidize their financial engineering in a race to stockpile their share of Bitcoin’s scarce supply as quickly as possible.

Ascend is positioning itself as more than just a conventional startup incubator. Founders will receive technical and strategic support on product architecture, tokenomics, investor readiness, legal and regulatory structuring, go-to-market strategies, and community development.

RWAs — such as corporate debt, private credit, commercial real estate, U.S. Treasuries, and even intellectual property — are increasingly being tokenized and transacted on-chain. The appeal lies in reducing settlement delays, fractionalizing high-value assets, embedding compliance rules into smart contracts, and opening access to traditionally illiquid markets.

Investors and institutions are starting to ask: What must these companies do next to build sustainable long-term differentiation?

If sats per share becomes the benchmark these treasury companies claim it is, then holding sats won’t be enough. The natural next step for Bitcoin holding companies is to truly become Bitcoin yield companies. However, these newcomers know they must not repeat the risk-heavy practices that brought down last cycle’s titans like BlockFi and Celsius. Reckless lending, opaque yield sources, and pure speculation cannot be the foundation of this next chapter. Instead, the priority should be transparent, trust-minimized, and ideally on-chain yield generation.

Early signals of this shift are already emerging. In Europe, Valour Inc. has launched a yield-bearing BTC ETP that has delivered a historical 5.65% APY through Bitcoin staking. Its parent company, DeFi Technologies, has a wide range of products and operations and was recently listed on Nasdaq. If you go further on-chain, Maple Finance recently surpassed BlackRock’s IBIT in AUM. They are launching structured Bitcoin products like lstBTC, which earns yield through purely on-chain mechanisms enabled by the emerging Bitcoin DeFi sector.

While still in its early stages, Bitcoin DeFi and other methods of increasing Bitcoin’s accessibility, utility, and use-case versatility represent a huge opportunity, particularly for public companies with sizable Bitcoin treasuries. Some Bitcoin treasury companies have already indicated plans to move beyond passive holding and take on more active, business-building operations. Eventually, this shift will become essential for any positive outlier treasury companies.

In effect, Bitcoin treasury companies are inverting the traditional public company playbook. The traditional playbook is that a company 1) makes products, 2) generates revenue through usage, and 3) eventually grows its balance sheet via profits and treasury optimization. Bitcoin-first companies start at step three in order to first get their share of Bitcoin’s scarce supply, but the best will double back to steps one and two. If the traditional order is product, revenue, then treasury, the Bitcoin-first model is treasury, yield, then products.

Ultimately, the sustainable path to outlier status is for Bitcoin treasury companies to become active yield generators and real operators. This means evolving into true businesses that deliver differentiated value to users in order to grow sats per share. From vaults to engines to products.

The next MicroStrategy will not be a Bitcoin treasury company. Nobody will recreate Saylor’s outlier success by simply combining holding and financial engineering.

The next breakout company will be the one that makes Bitcoin productive. It will contribute to the infrastructure that expands Bitcoin’s utility as a yield-bearing asset, a medium of exchange, a versatile form of collateral, or something entirely new.

This wasn’t feasible in previous cycles. But today, a wide-open landscape of on-chain scaling solutions has emerged. Public Bitcoin-holding companies now have the opportunity to become both the benefactors and beneficiaries of a new wave of Bitcoin-enabled product innovation, unlocking their treasure chests of digital gold.

We’ve moved beyond the phase of widespread Wall Street acceptance of Bitcoin. The next challenge is transforming idle Bitcoin into productive capital. The question now is who moves first: the incumbents with a head start and a vast store of digital gold, or the challengers with nimble teams and a pressing need to stand out.

Regardless, we’re entering a new era where the focus shifts from institutional adoption to institutional participation in building the Bitcoin-first economy.