Asia Morning Briefing: ‘Just Buy a Bitcoin ETF’ — BTC Treasury Model Faces Reality Check

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Bitcoin treasury companies are facing a simple but brutal test: can they outperform BTC itself, or should investors skip them and buy the asset outright?

“If you aren’t doing that, there’s no reason to do the strategies, just buy a Bitcoin ETF,” said Matt Cole, CEO of Strive Asset Management, during a panel at BTC Asia in Hong Kong.

Cole might be best known for being a staunch advocate of GameStop (GME) putting BTC on its balance sheet.

On stage, Cole described the playbook as a search for alpha, finding ways to outperform BTC without simply piling on bitcoin-specific risk. Cole explained that this comes down to financing, where he pointed to a shift from convertibles to perpetual preferred equity as a way to lock in leverage.

He added that the hardest milestone is scale: reaching $1 billion in capital, the point where financing becomes cheap enough to support IPOs and bigger teams.

“The hardest thing to do for bitcoin treasury companies is getting to a billion dollars,” he said, citing MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor.

That scale, Cole stressed, only works with bitcoin. Ethereum and other tokens, he said, act too much like equities with shifting monetary policies.

“Ethereum makes for a horrible asset for a treasury company,” Cole said. “Bitcoin perpetually goes up versus fiat currencies because they’re being debased.”

In his view, BTC's fixed supply makes it the only asset capable of supporting a levered treasury strategy designed to compound over time.

Andrew Webley of The Smarter Web Company, a publicly listed U.K. web designer with BTC on the balance sheet, struck a more measured tone regarding market NAV, Bitcoin yield versus dilution, and company size.

Smaller firms, he said, have an advantage in raising capital, but transparency and clear risk communication remain just as important as the math.

“The most important thing that you can do as a public company, in my opinion, is to publish our rules first,” Webley said, adding that clear disclosure helps investors understand the trade-offs of a BTC treasury model.

“If somebody can understand the risks, then in our opinion these things are the very best value opportunities in the whole world,” he added.

The split underscored the choice facing investors: invest in firms pursuing aggressive strategies to outperform BTC or favor companies that promise steady growth with clear transparency.

Either way, panelists agreed that bitcoin’s role as a treasury asset is only expanding as fiat continues to be debased.

Market Movement:

BTC: Bitcoin is trading above $110,500, trading slightly lower following a minor pullback, though signs of accumulation, such as resilient demand near key support, suggest market participants remain bullish on its next breakout, according to CoinDesk's market insights bot.

ETH: ETH is trading at $4300, down 0.6%. ETH continues to benefit from strong institutional interest and ETF inflows, which support its longer-term structural upside.

Gold: Gold continues to trade near record highs supported by rate‑cut expectations and increasing safe-haven demand, though it saw a slight pullback amid profit‑taking.

Nikkei 225: Japan's largest index continues to rally, buoyed by a combination of strong foreign buying, driven by the country's shift away from long‑term stimulus, corporate reforms, and rising yields, and dovish monetary cues from the U.S., boosting global equity sentiment.

S&P 500: The S&P 500 rose 0.83% to a record 6,502.08 as traders shrugged off weak private jobs data while awaiting Friday’s employment report for clues on rate-cut prospects and recession risks.

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