Crypto Assets and the Bidirectional Game of Listed Companies

Introduction

The election of Trump as President of the United States in 2024 has landmark significance for the global Crypto Assets industry, with pro-Crypto Assets policies becoming one of his core governance philosophies. This is followed by a series of favorable policies such as Bitcoin as a national reserve, stablecoin legislation, and Circle becoming the first stock of a stablecoin. The Crypto Assets industry is gradually moving towards compliance and embracing regulation.

At the same time, many listed companies have begun to follow MicroStrategy's successful model as BTC hoarders. There are numerous listed companies globally, many of which have seen their market value severely shrink and face liquidity shortages. By becoming hoarders, these shell companies can access new financing channels to supplement their liquidity. Even some companies unrelated to Crypto Assets or finance have joined the ranks of hoarders, such as the American luxury car modifier ECD, which raised $500 million through equity financing to become one of the Bitcoin hoarders.

However, recently, listed companies have a wider selection of coin hoarding options, and many tokens among the Top 100 Crypto Assets have been listed as alternatives. In fact, many project tokens are not suitable for long-term holding. Additionally, many tokens are relatively centralized, with the founding teams having significant decision-making power, making it difficult for coin hoarders to play a more important role. This article will explore in detail the bidirectional relationship between coin hoarders and Crypto Assets, as well as thoughts on decentralization.

1. A Public Company Perspective on Crypto Assets

There is no doubt that the primary demand for publicly listed companies choosing to finance the purchase of Crypto Assets lies in market value management. According to statistics, the number of publicly listed companies holding BTC has reached 34. At the same time, the management of several companies is actively transforming into hoarders of Crypto Assets such as ETH, SOL, and HYPE by 2025, in order to imitate the successful path of MicroStrategy. This strategy has indeed brought significant growth to the stock prices of publicly listed companies.

Sharplink Company previously focused on sports betting and announced in May 2025 the completion of approximately $425 million in private equity financing, planning to aggressively purchase ETH as its primary treasury reserve asset. The company's stock price rose from $2.97 to $124 within 10 days, an increase of over 40 times. The blockchain early project investment company Cypherpunk Holdings was renamed SOL Strategies in September 2024, indicating its alignment with Solana's version of MicroStrategy. The company's stock price increased from $0.08 to $4.24 within 3 months, an increase of over 50 times.

A large number of listed companies regard transforming into coin hoarders as a panacea for boosting stock prices, with purchased Crypto Assets expanding from BTC to SOL, HYPE, BNB, and others. In reality, many companies buying coins are merely following trends, and the management does not fully understand Crypto Assets, lacking a long-term strategic plan for purchasing coins. This chapter will take the perspective of listed companies and select suitable Crypto Assets for purchase based on their different needs.

1.1 Covering financing costs PoS public chain tokens > PoW public chain tokens

Initially, the public had a general understanding of listed companies holding coins due to MicroStrategy's one-time purchase of over 20,000 BTC in 2020. The company's CEO, Michael Saylor, declared that in the future, they would only buy BTC and never sell it. During the BTC bull market of 2020-2021, MicroStrategy's visibility continued to increase, and purchasing Crypto Assets allowed the listed company to turn its fortunes around, becoming a classic case in capital market operations.

Bitcoin is the representative public chain of PoW( proof of work), its mechanism lies in continuously performing hash collisions in mining pools through CPU, GPU, ASIC and other chip computing power, ultimately completing blockchain block generation to obtain BTC rewards. Before MicroStrategy bought BTC, Bitcoin mining companies such as Marathon, Riot, Cleanspark, etc. had their main business of mining BTC through mining machines, so these companies have a portion of unsold Crypto Assets on their balance sheets.

For listed companies, the issue of PoW public chain assets like BTC is similar to that of gold; after purchase, they can only serve as strategic reserves and are difficult to realize "money making money" through other means. PoS public chains, on the other hand, give more weight to the tokens themselves. Approval for PoS public chain transactions requires nodes to produce blocks, and to become a node, a certain amount of governance tokens must be staked. The staking amount for Ethereum network nodes is fixed at 32 ETH, while there is no staking limit for Solana network nodes. Governance token holders can share a certain percentage of transaction gas fees as rewards ( different public chain revenue-sharing mechanisms are different ).

For publicly listed companies that rely on debt financing, holding PoS public chain governance tokens and staking can yield an annualized return of 2%-7%. This portion of the income can cover the company's debt financing costs. Even if the company's performance declines, companies holding PoS public chain tokens do not need to worry about interest repayment issues.

1.2 How listed companies choose PoS public chain Crypto Assets

Compared to MicroStrategy's "Buy and Hold" strategy for BTC, the selection and purchase of PoS governance tokens by listed companies is a more complex systematic project. Some listed companies may prefer to buy Crypto Assets with higher price volatility; some companies may lean towards purchasing Crypto Assets with higher degrees of decentralization; there are also companies that cannot complete building their own nodes, thus needing to purchase Crypto Assets that have mature liquid staking platforms. The table below summarizes the characteristics of various tokens from multiple dimensions, providing a comprehensive reference for listed companies planning to purchase Crypto Assets.

The staking yield can be compared to the dividend yield of stocks. From the perspective of the demand of listed companies, the demand for becoming PoS token hoarders mainly falls into three categories: ( obtaining high staking yields, covering financing costs while having positive cash inflow. ) obtaining high asset appreciation, driving up stock prices. ( occupying a core position in the ecosystem, strategically laying out around the public chain ecosystem. The following text will filter suitable targets based on the different goals of listed companies.

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)# 1.2.1 Pursue High Staking Returns: SOL staking yield is high, and the public chain trading volume is stable.

For publicly listed companies that face high costs for issuing additional stocks or bonds, high-yield staking of Crypto Assets has strong appeal. According to data, the 7-day annualized return rates of public chains like Polkadot, Cosmos, and Celestia all exceed 10%. However, these Crypto Assets have very weak price preservation capabilities due to their high inflation rates. The aforementioned three types of assets have fallen by 42%, 36%, and 71% respectively over the past year. Staking yields cannot cover the price decline of the coins. This is not the optimal choice for publicly listed companies.

In contrast, SOL has maintained a rising trend in token prices over the past two years while having a relatively high staking yield, with the maximum price drawdown in the past two years being 52%, indicating strong stability. In the Solana staking yield model, node staking yield = ( blockchain rewards + MEV income + Tips income ) / total staking amount.

At both ends of the formula, the numerator part has the highest proportion of blockchain rewards, and the amount of blockchain rewards is related to the transaction volume of the public chain. The transaction volume of the Solana public chain has maintained rapid growth over the past five years, reaching 2.97 billion transactions in June. On the denominator side, the current staking rate of SOL has exceeded 65%, so there will not be a situation where a large amount of SOL joins the staking nodes, leading to a decline in yield. Overall, the staking rewards of 7% for Solana network nodes are relatively stable.

From the perspective of a listed company, the relatively difficult step in the business model of becoming a SOL hoarder through targeted issuance or bond financing and obtaining positive cash flow through node staking is building your own nodes. The Solana network nodes require high-performance servers as hardware support, with a minimum configuration of a 64-core processor, 256GB of memory, and a 1TB hard drive. In addition, becoming a network node also requires high-speed internet bandwidth support. On the software side, to become a Solana node, you need to download Git, Rust, and Docker, and configuring the node requires some coding knowledge.

It can be seen that if a listed company builds its own Solana network node, it requires a high technical threshold. If the company determines that the process of building its own node is relatively complex, it can choose between a liquid staking platform or RPC node services.

Jito is currently one of the main liquidity staking platforms on the Solana network, and its staking operation is relatively simple; just connect your wallet and input the corresponding amount to earn an annualized return of 7.19% ### as of July 3, 2025 (. However, using the staking platform will reduce returns to some extent, as the platform will not display the direct deduction rate. Specialized staking platforms can achieve higher Tips and MEV floating returns through staking, while stakers receive fixed annualized returns.

For companies that wish to achieve excess returns through Tips and MEV while also wanting to lower the threshold for node setup and fixed capital investment, they can choose RPC node services from node service providers like Helius. Users rent bare metal servers from the service providers, which ensure minimum latency ) <50ms ( and high throughput, meeting the high-performance requirements of Solana validators. In contrast to platforms like Jito where user returns are fixed and platform profits fluctuate; providers like Helius charge users a fixed fee ) with different package fees (, while floating revenues from MEV and Tips completely belong to the users.

In summary, the three options each have their pros and cons. Staking platforms are suitable for lightweight coin holders with lower investments, RPC node outsourcing services are suitable for medium-sized coin holders with a certain level of investment, while building one's own nodes is suitable for coin holders with relatively strong capital and certain technical setup capabilities. Additionally, being a SOL coin holder also carries certain risks, as the Solana network is relatively centralized and has previously experienced multiple mainnet downtime incidents, which can cause some impact on token prices.

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)# 1.2.2 Pursuit of Value Growth: HYPE Transaction Fee Buyback Mechanism, coin price has achieved a 10-fold increase

For listed companies facing liquidity shortages, the primary demand in the short term is still to enhance the market value of their stocks, maintaining normal operations through methods such as reducing stock holdings. As coin hoarders, listed companies commonly use the strategy of purchasing high-growth or high-valuation assets to rapidly increase stock prices. HYPE is a mainstream Crypto Asset expected to grow in market value in the first half of 2025. If listed companies become HYPE hoarders, their stock prices will be linked to the price of HYPE tokens, potentially achieving rapid growth in company market value in the short term.

Compared to public chains like SUI, TRON, and XRP, which have also seen significant market cap growth over the past year, HYPE's advantage lies in its refined token supply and demand management, ensuring the scarcity of HYPE tokens. Over the past six months, Hyperliquid's assistance fund has cumulatively repurchased HYPE worth $910 million by reinvesting approximately 97% of the Gas fee revenue into HYPE buybacks. Currently, only 34% of the total supply is in circulation, with 23.8% of tokens held by the team locked until 2027-2028, and nearly 39% of tokens designated for community rewards, which will be gradually distributed. As the project has not accepted venture capital funding, there is no external sell pressure, enhancing HYPE's long-term value potential.

The operating nodes of Hyperliquid are more centralized compared to Solana, with only 21 nodes existing in the entire network, which maintains the high efficiency of the public chain to a certain extent. Therefore, even if listed companies purchase a large amount of HYPE, it is difficult for them to become one of the 21 core nodes. The official staking platform of the public chain, StakedHYPE, will become an option for coin hoarders to earn additional income through staking. This platform has attracted over 10 million HYPE to join staking. Compared to other public chains, the staking yield of HYPE is relatively low, with data showing a yield of only 2.28%.

1.2.3 Pursuing ecological layout: ETH has a high degree of decentralization, and Layer 2 development difficulty is low.

In the field of Crypto Assets, redundancy among public chains is an obvious phenomenon. According to statistics, the total number of public chains on the entire network has exceeded 200. In fact, most developers choose to develop products on major public chains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Sui, while the trading volume of many independent public chains has been declining year by year.

From the perspective of listed companies, some companies are no longer satisfied with merely being coin hoarders; instead, they hope to build a second growth curve by hoarding coins and developing DeFi or GameFi projects on the public chain. Ethereum Layer 2 modular blockchain has become the preferred choice due to its low development difficulty and high flexibility.