Analyzing the Binary Relationship Between Listed Companies and Crypto Assets

Preface

The election of Trump as President of the United States in 2024 will have a significant impact on the global encryption industry, as crypto assets-friendly policies become one of his core governance principles. This will be followed by a series of favorable policies such as Bitcoin becoming a national reserve, stablecoin legislation, and Circle becoming the first stock of stablecoins. The crypto assets industry is gradually moving towards compliance and embracing regulation.

At the same time, many listed companies have begun to imitate the BTC hoarding model of Strategy. There are numerous listed companies globally, with some experiencing severe market value shrinkage and liquidity shortages. By acting as hoarders of coins, some shell companies have gained new financing channels to replenish liquidity. Even some companies unrelated to Crypto Assets or finance have joined the ranks of hoarders, such as the American luxury car modification company ECD, which raised $500 million through equity financing, becoming one of the Bitcoin hoarders.

However, recently, publicly listed companies have a wider range of choices for hoarding coins, with many tokens from the top 100 Crypto Assets being listed as alternatives. In fact, many project tokens are not suitable for long-term holding. Additionally, many tokens are relatively centralized, with significant decision-making power held by the founding team, making it difficult for hoarders to play a larger role. This article will explore in detail the binary relationship between hoarders and Crypto Assets, as well as thoughts on decentralization.

1. A Public Company Perspective on Crypto Assets

Undoubtedly, the primary demand for publicly traded companies choosing to finance the purchase of Crypto Assets lies in market value management. Data shows that there are currently 34 publicly traded companies holding BTC. At the same time, the management of several companies is proactively transforming the company into a Crypto Assets hoarder for ETH, SOL, HYPE, etc., by 2025, in order to emulate the successful path of Strategy. In fact, this strategy has indeed brought significant growth to the stock prices of publicly traded companies.

A certain company previously focused on sports betting, announced in May 2025 that it had completed approximately $425 million in private fundraising and significantly purchased ETH as its main treasury reserve asset. The company's stock price rose from $2.97 to $124 within 10 days, an increase of more than 40 times. The early blockchain project investment company was renamed to a certain company in September 2024, indicating that the company is the Solana version of Strategy. The company's stock price increased from $0.08 to $4.24 within 3 months, an increase of more than 50 times.

Many listed companies regard transforming into coin hoarders as a panacea to boost their stock prices, with purchased Crypto Assets expanding from BTC to SOL, HYPE, and BNB. In fact, many companies buy coins as a herd behavior, and their management does not fully understand Crypto Assets and lacks long-term strategic planning for coin purchases. This chapter will select suitable Crypto Assets for purchase from the perspective of listed companies based on different needs.

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

The public's general awareness of events like publicly listed companies holding coins began in 2020 when a certain company purchased over 20,000 BTC in one go. The company's CEO claimed that they would only buy BTC in the future and never sell. During the BTC bull market from 2020 to 2021, the company's visibility continued to rise, and the purchase of Crypto Assets became a classic case of how publicly listed companies could turn their fortunes around in the capital market.

Bitcoin is the representative public chain of PoW (Proof of Work), whose mechanism relies on the computing power of CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, and other chips to continuously perform hash collisions in mining pools, ultimately completing block generation on the blockchain to earn BTC rewards. Before a company buys BTC, Bitcoin mining companies such as Marathon, Riot, and Cleanspark have unsold Crypto Assets on their balance sheets because their main business is to mine BTC using mining machines.

For listed companies, the issues with PoW public chain assets like BTC are similar to those with gold; after purchase, they can only serve as strategic reserves, but it is difficult to achieve "money making money" through other means. PoS public chains assign more weight to the tokens themselves, and the approval of PoS public chain transactions requires nodes to produce blocks, while becoming a node requires staking a certain amount of governance tokens. The staking amount for Ethereum network nodes is fixed at 32 ETH, while there are no staking amount limits for Solana network nodes. Governance token holders can share a certain proportion of transaction Gas fees as rewards (different public chains have different revenue-sharing mechanisms).

For publicly listed companies that rely on debt financing, holding PoS public chain governance tokens and staking them can yield an annualized return of 2% to 7%. This portion of the income may 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 a certain company's "Buy and Hold" strategy for BTC, the selection and purchase of PoS public chain governance tokens by listed companies is a more complex systematic project. Some listed companies may prefer to purchase Crypto Assets with higher price volatility; some listed companies may prefer to purchase Crypto Assets with a higher degree of decentralization; and there are also companies that cannot complete their own node construction, and therefore need to purchase Crypto Assets with mature liquidity staking platforms. The table below summarizes the characteristics of various tokens from multiple dimensions, serving as a comprehensive reference for listed companies planning to purchase Crypto Assets.

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

)# 1.2.1 Pursuing High Staking Yields: SOL staking yield is high, and the public chain transaction volume is stable.

For publicly listed companies with high costs of issuing additional stocks or bonds, high-yield staking Crypto Assets are very attractive. Data shows that the 7-day annualized return rate of certain public chains exceeds 10%. However, these Crypto Assets have a very weak price preservation ability due to their high inflation rate. The aforementioned three types of Crypto Assets have dropped by 42%, 36%, and 71% respectively over the past year. Staking yields cannot cover the decline in coin prices. This is not the optimal choice for publicly listed companies.

In contrast, SOL has maintained a rising momentum in its token price over the past two years while offering a high staking yield, with the maximum price drawdown 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 5 years, with a monthly transaction volume of 2.97 billion in June. On the denominator side, the current staking rate of SOL has reached over 65%, so there will not be a situation where a large amount of SOL joins the staking nodes leading to a decrease in yield. Overall, the rewards for staking nodes in the Solana network at 7% are relatively stable.

From the perspective of a listed company, the relatively difficult step in the business model of becoming a SOL coin holder through directed issuance or bond financing and obtaining positive cash flow through node staking is building a self-owned node. Solana network nodes require high-performance servers for hardware support, with a minimum configuration of a 64-core processor, 256G memory, and 1T hard drive. In addition, becoming a network node also requires support from high-speed network bandwidth. On the software side, to become a Solana node, one needs to download Git, Rust, and Docker, and configuring the node requires some coding knowledge.

It can be seen that publicly listed companies need a high technical threshold to build their own Solana network nodes. If a company determines that the process of building nodes is too complex, it can choose a liquid staking platform or RPC node service.

A certain platform is one of the main liquidity staking platforms on the Solana network. The staking operation is relatively simple; by connecting a wallet and entering the corresponding amount, one can earn an annualized return of 7.19% (as of July 3, 2025). However, using a staking platform may reduce returns to some extent, as the platform does not display the direct commission rate. Specialized staking platforms can obtain higher Tips and MEV floating returns through staking, while stakers receive fixed annualized returns.

For companies looking to achieve excess returns through Tips and MEV while wanting to lower the barriers to node setup and fixed capital investment, they can choose the RPC node services of certain node service providers. Users lease bare metal servers from service providers to ensure minimum latency (<50ms) and high throughput to meet the high-performance requirements of Solana validators. Unlike certain staking platforms where user returns are fixed and platform profits fluctuate; some service providers charge users a fixed fee (with different fees for different packages), while floating returns from MEV and Tips belong entirely to the users.

In summary, each of the three options has its own advantages and disadvantages. 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 self-built nodes are 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 have a certain impact on token prices.

![Gate Research Institute: Analyzing the Dual Relationship Between Listed Companies and Crypto Assets]###https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-f570d69adbd4267d0df2d49fca2b30c2.webp(

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

For publicly listed companies facing a liquidity shortage, the primary demand in the short term remains to enhance stock market value, maintaining normal operations through means such as stock reductions. As coin hoarders, publicly listed companies commonly adopt the strategy of buying high-growth or high-valuation assets to quickly boost stock prices. HYPE is the mainstream Crypto Asset for market value growth in the first half of 2025. If publicly listed companies become HYPE coin hoarders, their stock prices will be linked to HYPE token prices, potentially achieving rapid growth in company market value in the short term.

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

The operational nodes of this project are more centralized compared to Solana, with only 21 nodes existing in the entire network, which helps maintain the high efficiency of the public chain to some extent. Therefore, even if publicly 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 will become an option for coin hoarders to obtain additional profits through staking. This platform has attracted over 10 million HYPE for staking. Compared to other public chains, the staking yield of HYPE is relatively low, with one website showing a yield of only 2.28%.

![Gate Research Institute: Analyzing the Dual Relationship Between Listed Companies and Crypto Assets]###https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-444f4fe50365faee234337781bba8cae.webp(

)# 1.2.3 Pursuing ecological layout: ETH has a high degree of decentralization, and Layer2 development difficulty is low.

In the field of Crypto Assets, redundancy of 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, but instead hope to build a second growth curve by hoarding coins and developing DeFi or GameFi projects on public chains. Ethereum Layer 2 modular blockchain has become the preferred choice for these companies due to its low development difficulty and high flexibility.

Rollups as a Service (RaaS) is a major trend in blockchain infrastructure for 2024-2025.