What if public company stocks could offer exposure to crypto — without direct token ownership? A growing number of public companies have made this possible by adopting public market crypto treasury strategies. With this emerging trend, businesses raise capital from equity markets to buy and hold digital assets, like Bitcoin or Solana, on their balance sheets. By doing this, they offer shareholders indirect exposure to crypto assets using the familiar convenience of traditional stock ownership.
In a recent ICR Conference Spotlight Series webinar, industry leaders explored the evolution of this strategy, what’s driving its adoption, and what it could mean for the future of corporate finance. Below, we highlight the key takeaways from their discussion.
Core strategy vs. incidental allocation
Not all corporate crypto strategies are created equal. “An incidental allocator is something like Tesla, that actually wants to put a portion of its balance sheet to work and hold it in the form of a digital asset,” explained Brian Rudick, Chief Strategy Officer at Upexi. “Then, those that look at this as a core strategy are the ones going out there and accessing the capital markets to try to actually buy more of the digital asset that they’re underpinned by.”
This distinction matters for investors and the broader market. Companies with a core strategy tap into capital markets to actively grow their crypto holdings, creating what Rudick calls a “capital markets flywheel.” As the market assigns the company a premium valuation, they can raise more capital, buy more assets, and drive their share price higher.
From speculation to strategy
“In 2020, allocations to Bitcoin were still considered very speculative. They were limited to very visionary outliers,” said Leah Wald, President and CEO of Sol Strategies. Now, companies have moved past Bitcoin-only holdings and built more comprehensive digital asset strategies.
According to Wald, the evolution of this strategy can be traced back to MicroStrategy’s co-founder and former CEO, Michael Saylor. “[He] didn’t just buy Bitcoin; he framed it as a long-term capital allocation strategy,” she explained. This created what Wald described as a “new public company category” focused on digital asset operations. “That model, paired with macro drivers like inflation fears and low rates, and eroding trust in FIAT, catalyzed that first wave of institutional adoption,” she said.
The strategy gained momentum when Tesla and Square followed suit in 2021, and later with the approval of Bitcoin ETFs, which helped ease institutional concerns.
The capital markets arbitrage
The financial engineering behind these strategies is remarkably effective. David Bailey, founder of Nakamoto Holdings, pointed to MetaPlanet as a prime example: “We underwrote that business at a $15 million market cap roughly a year ago, and today they’re sitting at a $7 billion market cap with the price of Bitcoin only doubling over that period of time.”
This outperformance stems from what Bailey described as a fundamental arbitrage opportunity. “Bitcoin treasury companies are operating companies, they’re a financial arbitrage play,” he explained. “Fundamentally, you buy them because you think that they’re going to give you some amount of leveraged exposure to Bitcoin that’s going to drive outperform relative to holding Bitcoin directly.”
Beyond Bitcoin: the proof-of-stake advantage
While Bitcoin is the flagship asset for many treasury strategies, companies focused on proof-of-stake networks like Solana (another high-performance blockchain) have developed additional ways to create value. Unlike Bitcoin’s energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus mechanism, proof-of-stake networks allow token holders to earn yield through staking — essentially turning holdings into yield generating assets.
Sol Strategies exemplifies this approach by operating validator nodes alongside their treasury strategy. “The more Sol that we accumulate, the more that we can stake to our validators,” said Ward. “We have immense yield on the validator side, and we make money from the commission side of running the validators.”
Looking forward: institutional adoption and global expansion
Mainstream institutional adoption of these strategies is already under-way and likely to continue, based on increasing participation from multi-managers, hedge funds, and convertible arbitrage funds. “Crypto-native hedge funds, as well as the ‘whales’ out there, have really stepped up and come into the TradFi market,” said John D’Agostini, Co-Head of Investment Banking at Clear Street.
Nakamoto will pursue what Bailey calls a “Micro Strategy Squared” strategy, which aims to create Bitcoin treasury vehicles in capital markets worldwide. “Our goal is to bring a Micro Strategy-like equity entity to every capital market on the planet,” he said, adding that they are targeting 80 public companies across 80 different capital markets in the coming years.
Some companies’ strategies have begun to evolve beyond simple asset accumulation toward native blockchain integration. Sol Strategies recently announced plans to be among the first public companies to tokenize its common shares on Solana, enabling 24/7 trading and DeFi protocol participation.
In recent years, the crypto treasury strategy has moved from experimental outlier to legitimate corporate finance tool, with institutional backing, evolving regulatory frameworks, and sophisticated financial engineering driving rapid growth. As these companies continue to innovate and expand globally, they’re not just accumulating digital assets; they’re reshaping the fundamental infrastructure of capital markets.
To dive deeper into the strategic rationale, benefits, risks, and examples of this trend, listen to the full webinar, “HODL On Tight: Examining the Rise of Public Market Crypto Balance Sheet Strategies.”
