Bitcoin Treasuries Over the Next Decade

All right, cool. Let’s start with some brief introductions. Amanda, tell us a little bit about yourself.

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Hi, everyone. My name is Amanda Fabiano. I’m the CEO of Nakamoto.

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Hey, everyone. I’m Jeremy Almond. I’m the CEO of Paystand. We are the largest business payment network built on the Bitcoin blockchain. A million customers, $20 billion in volume, 2% of the U.S. economy built on the Bitcoin blockchain.

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Hi, everybody. I’m Jonny. I’m the co-founder of On Nexus. We build on-chain solutions that allow treasury companies, institutions, and Bitcoin holders to earn a yield on Bitcoin, self-custodied on-chain.

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Jonny also has the coolest name in the world, Jonny Himalaya. We’re talking about Bitcoin treasuries over the next decade, so I want to start by having our panelists paint a picture or cast a vision of what the next ten years look like. Let’s fast forward. We’re at 2036. What does the industry look like? What are some things that people maybe aren’t anticipating that you’re seeing as operators behind the scenes?

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That’s a really interesting question, because I feel like every four years in Bitcoin seems like 35 years, so it’s hard to think about a ten-year time frame. We’ve just seen the market continue to evolve over the years, and I think we’ll continue to see that. I think we’re going to see more of a convergence of traditional finance and the Bitcoin world.

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From a treasury perspective, you’ll see more companies moving toward an operational model or focusing on capital market optimization. When people think about Bitcoin in the future, they always think about a price target. But I always think about what businesses are going to exist in the future. I would hope that a lot of the companies being built in this era will continue into the next decade.

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I think it’s true. You’re going to have more and more Bitcoin business adoption. It’s crazy to me that this treasury conversation has actually crossed the chasm. A few years ago, the idea that corporations were using Bitcoin as a treasury would have been a crazy notion. Now I’d say we already have momentum there.

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So I want to talk about what’s past that, which is Bitcoin being used in the real world for businesses to fuel their operations. One way to look at Bitcoin treasury is that it’s digital capital, but capital in general is just fuel for your business. If you simply have great capital in your business and your business doesn’t do anything, it’s not a very good business.

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What I really want to plant in your minds is that Bitcoin as digital capital becomes the fuel for a more efficient business. Businesses can run cheaper because they have a lower cost of capital. Businesses can move their money faster. That makes them more competitive. And businesses that don’t need to use a traditional financial system can lower their costs and put that back into more jobs, more business creation, and more GDP growth, which is good for our economy and ultimately good for the world. That all starts with businesses using Bitcoin.

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I’d like to piggyback a little bit off what Jeremy said. If we go ten years down the road, the dreamer’s point of view would be that if hyperbitcoinization truly happens, the concept of a treasury company would probably be over because every company would just have Bitcoin operationally.

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This whole strategy of being a treasury company to put Bitcoin on your balance sheet purely for treasury would be a moot point, because companies will have Bitcoin because they use it in their day-to-day operations and they’re getting yield from it.

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I think that’s a great point. I think about this with Bitcoin meetups too. Bitcoin meetups are a thing right now because we’re trying to propel adoption forward. But in ten years, there are no dollar meetups, right? I think it’s along similar lines. We’re just going to see Bitcoin embedded in everything, so it becomes a little bit redundant.

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What sort of headwinds do we anticipate over the next ten years? Bitcoin has experienced pushback from regulators, and even what we’re seeing with topics like MSCI. There are probably cultural headwinds, narrative work, and marketing work that we need to do. What do you see as potentially problematic that maybe people in this room aren’t anticipating over the next ten years?

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I think regulation will always be an up and down. There will be different things that are built that traditional industries might push back on because it might affect how they make money. That will consistently be something coming around the corner in every market cycle.

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I think growth, adoption, and just the storyline of Bitcoin are things we could probably do a better job of explaining. Bitcoin is a lot of different things to different people. You can explain Bitcoin differently to whatever crowd you’re talking to, and I think that’s one of the most incredible things about it. It can be whatever you want.

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It can be your savings account. It can be your spending account. It can be something businesses use. It can be something businesses hoard. There is no Bitcoin marketing department, so how we explain it is really interesting. Depending on who the clientele is, how they adopt it can be very different.

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I used to work at Fidelity, and how you explain Bitcoin to Fidelity was very different from how I explained Bitcoin to my mom. All of us doing our part there would be super helpful. But regulation is something we’re always going to have to think about around the corner, and that just goes with the wind of where things are going.

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One less obvious headwind right now is stablecoin adoption around the world. It is growing faster than any financial infrastructure in the world. Stablecoins have more volume in certain places than Visa and Mastercard combined.

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When you talk to the clientele that we do, which is generally large corporations, the largest Fortune 500 companies, the largest banks, and the largest portions of the economy, their conversation is unfortunately not starting with, how do I Bitcoin? Their conversation is starting with, how do I stablecoin?

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Here’s the problem with that: the vast majority of stablecoin volume is not sitting on the Bitcoin blockchain. What it’s really doing is making traditional financial infrastructure more efficient, but it’s doing nothing beyond that.

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The question for us is how you marry the two, where stablecoin maybe becomes the bridge to Bitcoin. But on its current path, stablecoin volume is sitting outside of Bitcoin. We don’t think that’s a good thing, because Bitcoin is freedom money. It’s digital access for people around the world. It’s infrastructure that lowers the cost for global remittance around the world. Bitcoin is the single most important invention in our lifetime.

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It’s incumbent on us to create really good use cases. We want to take all of that energy and infrastructure going into stablecoins, which is really just perpetuating the traditional dollar, and put that on Bitcoin, which has no owner, no individual that can hold you back, and can be used anywhere in the world instantaneously, automatically, and globally.

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We want to marry those two things, because if we don’t, we’re going to be in a world where stablecoin eats Bitcoin. And that’s not the reason most of us got involved in Bitcoin in the first place.

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In terms of headwinds, we have a small bit of an identity crisis. Different parts of the Bitcoin community view hyperbitcoinization in different ways. If you go way back to the old school, it was all about no counterparties. You don’t need to trust the bank to send value from one person to another. That philosophy still exists in certain communities.

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But in the new age of hyperbitcoinization, you obviously have institutional involvement, where banks are getting involved in the Bitcoin economy. You can look at it two different ways. Do we look at the banks getting involved as friction, or do we welcome this?

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Bitcoin is a disruptive technology, and like any disruptive technology, there are always incumbents who end up being faded out. Music streaming changed the record industry in a large way. Does hyperbitcoinization get rid of an industry, or does the industry take it on board and try to adapt with it?

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It really depends on what your view of hyperbitcoinization is. Is it a completely sovereign, self-custodial financial system that doesn’t need any banks or institutions, or is it a new hard asset that the whole financial system can benefit from? Once you answer that question, you can decide what the headwinds are.

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One thing that’s interesting: we were just on a panel with Kraken, and we were asking how they’re working with traditional banks. The head of institutional there said something that really stuck with me. He said it’s easier for us to learn traditional finance than it is for traditional finance to learn Bitcoin.

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Right now, we’re in this really interesting time where we can see some of these companies that have built over the last decade really come out on the other side and maybe take a little bit more ownership of where finance is going compared to the traditional banks. I guess it’s a race we’ll watch over the next decade.

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Kraken is coming up next, so just a quick commercial. I also want to reset the room a little bit. I see a lot of people standing in the back. If there’s an empty seat next to you, will you do me a favor and scoot in so some of these people can see? It is a little bit chaotic here, but we love to see it. Welcome. We’re glad you’re here, and we’re going to keep going with this conversation.

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Over the next ten years, what is it going to take for some of these legacy companies sitting on millions or billions of dollars in cash to wake up to what’s happening? It feels like we’re almost at a point where it’s a fiduciary obligation to be paying attention to what’s happening in the Bitcoin space, and ignoring it is going to potentially have some consequences. What do you think is going to happen in order for some of these large companies to capitulate?

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We do see some large companies with Bitcoin on the balance sheet that have had it for a while. Fidelity has been mining Bitcoin since 2013. They hold a large Bitcoin stack, long before Bitcoin treasuries were a thing. Tesla has a lot of Bitcoin on the balance sheet.

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I think you’re right. At some point, it is an obligation to say, hey, what is this thing, and does it make sense for us? But every company has its own risk framework and what makes sense for them. This goes back to the educational piece and how we think about Bitcoin existing in the world.

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I think there is more Bitcoin on balance sheets than I would have expected at this point, which is surprising and nice. Over time, as people learn more about it, that’s great. We love Bitcoin, obviously. But when you think about it as an asset, it is extremely volatile. As a CFO or a public company, you do have to think about the risk of holding that. The volatility of Bitcoin is difficult to explain versus holding cash. As we see these volatile waves get compressed, maybe there will be more and more adoption in the future.

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One of the hard parts in my journey is that oftentimes you start off with Bitcoin and you want to orange-pill people. You want to tell them about the economic model and the financial model, and people’s eyes glaze over. What I’ve found over time is the best way is actually just to have people use it and touch it in different experiences.

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Saylor has done such an incredible job educating the market around treasury. We went a different route. We’ve been in business a long time, and we were probably the first or second Bitcoin payment processor in the world. Over time, what we learned is that we talked less and less about Bitcoin.

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We service many of the largest Fortune 500 companies. The way we talk about it is, don’t you think your money and your capital should move at the speed of light, at zero cost, and completely automatically? Then let’s figure out ways for your business to engage so you can get Bitcoin treasury, but you don’t need to go get board approval. Bitcoin treasury on one dimension might need board approval, especially if you’re a public company.

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For example, we have a corporate card. With the corporate card, you just spend in dollars, in fiat, like you do with your normal corporate expenses when you bought your airplane ticket here or whatever. But then the rewards points go back into the corporate balance sheet instead of just some Amex points that you have no clue what they do. All of a sudden, that gets Bitcoin on the balance sheet in a completely Trojan horse way.

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The CFO now has to determine what to do with it. Most of the time, because they effectively got it for free, they keep it on the balance sheet, and then that becomes the entry point for them to start increasing their treasury position. The point is that Bitcoin is being adopted more and more in both the real world and the business landscape, but maybe not straight head on.

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In terms of what we need to achieve greater adoption, I think as the products become more mature, whether that’s a software product or a financial product, we have a lot of innovation now with Stripe, Strive, and the different things Strategy is doing. As this marketplace matures, and as the volatility dampens, as Amanda mentioned, Bitcoin is still seen as a very volatile asset. Over time, the consensus is that it will become less and less volatile.

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Then it is seen as less risky to put Bitcoin on your balance sheet. Once that volatility is dampened a little bit, you’ll start to see more and more innovative products. If there is demand, and it’s not as volatile anymore, I’m willing to hold it. Now what can I do with it? Can I make payments? Can I earn yield? Can I borrow? Can I lend? Once all of these products come on board, there will be a snowball effect where everybody says, oh, you can do all of this with Bitcoin? Yeah, let’s go for it.

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We can’t talk about the next ten years without talking about AI. I know it’s very buzzworthy. We had a panel earlier about AI, but I do want to talk about what you’re seeing that is already emerging. We already live in a different world today than even six months ago. I don’t know about you, but I’m at a point where if Claude is down, I’m a little bit panicked. I’m like, what do I do now? I forget how to work in the old sense.

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So far it doesn’t seem like AI is coming for jobs, or at least some of the scary narratives that have been out there. But as operators and visionaries, how do you see AI continuing to be integrated into the Bitcoin corporate space, if at all?

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Whenever there is something new like AI, the scary narrative is that every job is going away. The same thing happened with Bitcoin mining. When Bitcoin mining became more institutionalized, the narrative was that jobs were going away and mining was eating all the grid. What ends up happening is that different industries get created, and how people work ends up being different.

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Maybe there will be AI with Bitcoin as the currency. That could potentially be something we’ll see. I think we’ll see more people using AI to be more efficient at their jobs, not necessarily taking over the job. You still have to edit anything that exists today. Maybe that will adjust over time, but we still need people’s brains to make sense of things. AI just makes you a little bit more efficient at this point.

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I feel like I’m being the spicy one with the opposite takes. Our headquarters are in Silicon Valley, and I would say most Silicon Valley CEOs I know think it is radically going to transform jobs. I think the two most important changes in our lifetime, at least in the last hundred years if not longer, are the transformation of money, which is Bitcoin, and the transformation of labor, which is AI. Those two things are changing how society operates.

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In Silicon Valley, every CEO I know is saying that 50% of staff is going to change how they do their own business. In our own company, we’re not huge. We’re around 400 employees. When I think about the next stage of our growth, I would normally think about going from 400 employees to 4,000 employees. I think we’ll go from 400 employees to 500 employees and 5,000 digital employees.

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That’s already happening in our organization. Probably within the next quarter, we will have one digital employee per actual human, and that is exponentially growing every single quarter. We’re not the only company doing that. That’s how fast we’re growing and how much leverage is happening. It’s happening in the financial stack with products and services, and it’s happening in every part of operations.

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Here’s the key point: how do those digital employees and agents actually do commerce? Commerce is the fundamental piece of human society. They need a way to do it through digital money. We believe it’s extremely important that they do it through digital money that is done through Bitcoin, freedom, and open-access money. Bitcoin will be the thing that agents prefer. Labor is transforming, and digital money is the perfect transformation around digital labor.

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As a software company, we’ve been on AI since the get-go. All of our coders are using Claude Code to help them with their code. We’ve got different agents running different workflows in our company, so we’re very much in tune. We have a blueprint for what the future of Bitcoin looks like with AI agents.

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I think everybody would agree that an agent can’t own a bank account, and AI agents can’t KYC to an exchange. So how are AIs going to transact? It almost becomes common sense that they’re going to use some form of cryptocurrency. Obviously, the most trusted and battle-tested cryptocurrency is Bitcoin.

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I see a future where AI agents are communicating with each other and transacting with each other on the Bitcoin blockchain. What’s interesting to note is that while some people think Bitcoin is a slow network compared to other networks, with block times of ten minutes, in terms of communication, the Bitcoin blockchain is one of the fastest communication layers in the world.

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If you think about how Bitcoin miners propagate transactions among each other, this happens at the speed of light. If you’re into networks, any message can be passed from one miner to another in less than two hops. You can represent agents as nodes on the Bitcoin network and have them communicate and transact with each other using Bitcoin, not only for payments but also for high-speed communication. That’s what I see as the future of Bitcoin and AI.

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As we wrap up, I want to invite you all to give some final thoughts on the next decade, or whatever you want to talk about.

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Nakamoto owns BTC Inc, which owns this event and puts it on, and we also own a financial services and asset management group. What I think is really interesting with AI, which dovetails into this, is that human connection starts to become even more important. Meeting someone versus understanding if they are an AI becomes more important.

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I think the event world is really cool. That’s one thing I’ve been thinking about. In-person events will become more interesting as the world goes to AI agents and you don’t know if you’re talking to an agent or someone over email. That’s something I’m looking forward to in what we’re building.

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I think Bitcoin is going to continue to gain adoption. We’ll see different trends pop up that we can’t even really imagine. It’s going to be really cool when, in ten years, we look back and say, wow, none of the things we said on stage actually happened, but totally different things did. That continues to happen. Everyone here has been in Bitcoin for a while, and I don’t think any of us had a crystal ball. I can’t say I have a crystal ball on what comes next, but I’m really excited to watch it play out.

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I’m excited because we’ve spent so much time in my world just trying to make Bitcoin usable to businesses around the world. This is an example of how much the world has changed. If you’re interested in business products, from cross-border payments to payroll and more, Paystand is a great place.

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What we’re excited to announce, and have been announcing with a bunch of launch partners this week, is something called USD, which is the first stablecoin built on Bitcoin, natively built for businesses, built for bots, and enabled for the infrastructure. We believe connecting the two worlds, traditional companies and traditional commerce to global commerce on Bitcoin, is the most important thing we can do to transform our economy.

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I’m super excited for the innovation we’re going to see over the next ten years as companies have Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Last year was all about treasury companies just accumulating Bitcoin. But I think it’s obvious, with the way these treasury companies have been priced, that you’ve got to do something with that Bitcoin. You’ve got to put that Bitcoin to work.

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I’m super excited to see the mix of financial products and software products that are invented, and the combination of the two, where you can have Bitcoin wrapped in a financial product while also using a software product that puts it to use, earns yield, and makes it productive. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the next few years of those combinations work out.

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Thank you all so much. I really enjoyed this conversation. That’s all the time we have for this panel. Please help me thank our panelists.