What Makes a Bitcoin Treasury Company Successful?

Good afternoon. This is very exciting because last year when we were here, it was all about Bitcoin treasury. This year, the market has obviously gone through a bit of a cycle correction, but we're still here talking about Bitcoin treasury. Things are very different now.

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My name is Jason. I'm the founder and managing partner at Sora Ventures. We've been investing in Bitcoin since the early days of Metaplanet. We were one of the earliest investors with Amanda there. Then we did Hong Kong, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, and we had one on Nasdaq. So we've been in this space for some time. I'll let Amanda introduce herself.

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Hi, I'm Amanda Fabiano. I'm COO of Nakamoto. Nakamoto is a Bitcoin operating company with a treasury foundation. We own Bitcoin Inc., which is where we're all at today. We also own UTXO. Before being at Nakamoto, I was in the mining space. I had an advisory firm, I was the head of mining at Galaxy, and I was also the director of Bitcoin mining at Fidelity.

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Hi everyone. My name is Paul Lee. I'm the CEO of Bitplanet. Before Bitplanet, I did a bunch of stuff. I started at Lehman Brothers in 2007, so the timing was pretty impeccable there. If you're old enough to remember guys carrying boxes out of the Lehman office, I was one of them.

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After the financial crisis, I became a lawyer. I practiced as a corporate lawyer for about five years. I was fortunate to represent Galaxy and Grayscale in their early days, around 2017. That's when I first discovered Bitcoin. Then I started my own fund as a solo GP. I worked on my own fund for about four years in the infrastructure, stablecoin, and Bitcoin infrastructure space.

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In 2025, last year, exactly here in Vegas, I met Jason. I always had this aspiration of building a Bitcoin treasury company in Korea because I think Bitcoin is such an important asset, especially for Koreans, given their very unique macroeconomic and geopolitical setup. That was my dream. I met Jason, and he had his vision across Asia. We hit it off right away. We found that we were very aligned and looking in the same direction.

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We started Bitplanet last September. It's been a fun ride. Bitplanet is a public company in Korea. We are listed on the KOSDAQ market. We have about 150 employees. We are in the SI business, the system integration business. We have about $25 million to $30 million of revenue per year. It's a cash flow positive business, and it's a growing business because a lot of our clients are rebuilding their IT infrastructure in the face of AI. We have 300 Bitcoin, and I can say at this point pretty safely that we are the only Korean company that is growing our Bitcoin stack.

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This is very interesting because we have two panelists here, one in the U.S. and one in Asia. More importantly, these two companies are continuously finding ways to grow the company, whether that is accumulating more Bitcoin or accumulating more cash flow. Obviously, we have been in a phase where things have changed quite a bit in our industry. Amanda and Paul, I want to get your perspective on the things you care more about today versus last year. What do you value today versus last year? What have you learned, and how do you define success moving forward?

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Being a public company is a very different thing than being a private company. The way you are looked at and judged is totally different. We merged into a healthcare business, and when you look back at the financials of our company, the trailing 12-month financials were a healthcare business. When you go to value us and try to look at our track record, it doesn't really reflect the company that we are today.

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We are heads down and focused on working on the operating companies, having them be cash flow generating, and being able, in a quarter or two quarters, to have our financials tell the story of Nakamoto. Nakamoto has only been around for seven months, believe it or not. This transition to being a public company has happened at the same time as markets completely crashing. I think it's going to take a little bit for our story to be understood by the public.

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My thing is consistency with what we're doing and having that be our focus. That's the operator perspective of where I think things are going. I also think you'll start to see some of the other companies have more of a focus on IR too, because what differentiates you from someone else that's just holding Bitcoin on the balance sheet?

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Paul, what about you? You guys are in Asia, with a different environment and different regulation. What is valuable for you moving forward, and how do you value yourself compared to what you saw last year?

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I share a lot of the things Amanda just said. My thesis is that a strong Bitcoin treasury company is, at the end of the day, a strong company. You have to strive to be a strong company in a traditional sense. Do you have growing revenue? Do you have positive cash flow? Do you have a strong management team? What is your ROE? What is your ROA? You have to look at all these things.

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Just looking at Bitcoin in a silo as your balance sheet asset and making that the end story of your company does not work, unless you have 800,000 Bitcoin like Strategy. It does not work, especially in places like Korea where financial engineering and financial regulations are much more rigid. There is not a lot you can do in terms of financial engineering. For example, trading at a premium, issuing a lot of debt or equity, buying a lot of Bitcoin, and creating that flywheel does not work.

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When I look at a company, I think the same framework applies. Every company has an income statement and a balance sheet, and both are very important. On the balance sheet side, treasury management and capital allocation are very important. On the income statement side, P&L, revenue, and cash flow are important. I think the hardest part, and the challenge ahead for all Bitcoin treasury companies, is building productive infrastructure that connects your Bitcoin treasury with your income story in a synergistic and seamless way.

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What is interesting about this bear market is that there is a lot more smart money out there. Historically, if prices went through a correction, people would get really negative and try to exit. This bear market is interesting because a lot of our listed companies went through a correction, and people are coming and knocking on doors asking, can we invest with you, can we merge with you, can we do something with you?

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That is the part people don't understand. If you're in the public market, there are a lot of opportunities to do things even after a correction. Amanda, you've obviously come from both sides, private and public. What is something you find exciting that maybe from the outside people don't really see, but from operating it, keeps you excited every day?

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In my opinion, bear markets are the best for building actual businesses. In a bull market, there are a lot of things coming at you and there is so much noise. There is a lot of signal in a bear market. My favorite thing is finding the people who have been building things and figuring out how we can work with them, invest in them, or even hire them. We're looking at M&A, we're looking at different companies, and we're looking at our company and asking, what are the best products we can build in the verticals we already have?

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It's sad when price is down, but I think there is a massive amount of opportunity. You'll continue to see more people learn about it, and there are not a lot of tourists when price is down. I do agree with you that the institutional side of things has continued to grow. We are not in the first or second cycle. Even in the last cycle, we had all the miners go public. A lot of institutional capital and banks had to learn a little bit more about Bitcoin because there were 21-plus public miners that went public in the 2021 timeframe.

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Last year, you saw this wave of what were called digital asset treasury companies going public. The initial group of analysts and IR people knew a little bit about Bitcoin because of the miners. Now you're seeing some of those same analysts cover the digital asset treasury companies and more. I think you'll continue to see adoption.

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Yesterday we hosted Day at Nakamoto, which really showed the flywheel of all the companies that we have. We had something like 15 to 20 banks show up to talk to Bitcoin companies, learn about what they're building, and see how they could service those companies. I do think there is more intersection of traditional finance and Bitcoin.

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I was on a panel yesterday with someone from Kraken, and he said that it is a little bit easier for Bitcoin companies like Kraken to learn traditional finance than it is for traditional finance to learn about Bitcoin. I thought that was a really interesting take and also really true, because the risk frameworks that traditional banks have don't allow them to move as quickly as a Kraken of the world. That will be interesting to keep an eye on, the Krakens of the world and what they're doing in the next cycle, and how that ends up being perceived by the public markets.

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Speaking about institutional adoption, Korea is very interesting too. For those who don't know, in the U.S. you can buy Bitcoin, and that sort of freedom is really a luxury in Asia. In Asia, a lot of these public companies are trying to figure out how to onboard institutions. For example, in Korea, even though Korean exchanges have some of the highest volumes in the world, institutions actually cannot trade. It is very difficult for institutions to even buy Bitcoin, because the minute you ask for a wire to go out and you tell them, hey, we're buying a digital asset, they are going to block it.

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Maybe we can learn from Paul's perspective on how Korea is different from other markets, and how this market has allowed a lot of institutions to enter into Bitcoin through Bitplanet.

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Korea is a very interesting market. There is definitely a lot of latent demand from institutions to have exposure to Bitcoin. As Jason mentioned, it is legally impossible for these institutions to open an account with crypto exchanges like Upbit. So there is a set of opportunities for us to be that access channel, for these institutions to hold Bitcoin through us.

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More broadly, there are definitely a set of challenges and opportunities operating a Bitcoin treasury company in Korea. The challenges are many. To level set, the regulatory regime in Korea is very different from that of the U.S. It is a positive regulatory regime, which means unless something is explicitly stated in the law, regulation, or code, you cannot do it. That is the other way around in the U.S. I am overgeneralizing here.

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In Korean law, there are specific things that are listed as financial products. Bitcoin is obviously not one of them. There are pros and cons to that approach. The pro is that it always provides very clear guidance on what you can do and what you cannot do. The downside is that whenever there is a new technology or innovation, especially on the fintech side, it gets stifled. People just cannot do it because it is not specifically stated in the regulation. It takes forever for the legislature and Congress to take action. Bitcoin is in that gray area right now.

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That presents a lot of challenges for Bitcoin treasury companies, starting with just buying Bitcoin. How are we going to handle it accounting-wise, tax-wise, with public disclosure and filings? From Bitplanet's side, we spent a lot of time building defensible infrastructure that spans all the way from internal governance to custody and public filing. That's one of the challenges we're trying to solve as we go.

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The opportunity is that if we solve this right, if we do this the right way, we are going to be the category definer. We are going to be the only company doing what we're doing. Korea is the 12th largest economy in the world. It has the eighth largest equity market in the world. To be able to do that, and to be able to do that alone, is actually a huge advantage and personally means a lot to me as I work on this.

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I think that's important because the evolution of how people hold and buy Bitcoin has changed quite a bit. Ten years ago, if you wanted to obtain Bitcoin, you had to mine Bitcoin. Then you had crypto exchanges that allowed people to buy Bitcoin in the form of tokens. Now people are going to be buying Bitcoin mostly through securities. I have a lot of friends who never bought Bitcoin before, and their first Bitcoin exposure is through our shares.

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A lot of people are asking, if we're investing into Bitcoin, are we investing into Bitcoin treasury? Last year, I think the standard metric was NAV, or how many Bitcoin you have. But as we went through that huge correction, we realized as investors that it's not necessarily about how much capital you raise. It's more about the consistency you show throughout the year. Are you still buying Bitcoin on a monthly basis? Are you still able to buy Bitcoin on a monthly basis?

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From our fund's perspective, we care a lot about these things. But I know the U.S. and Asian markets are different. More importantly, Amanda's company is in a position where they can do a lot more things because they did it early and made it clear that they can invest in other things. You mentioned potential M&A. Are you able to share, in your opinion, what are some new ways the audience should evaluate Bitcoin treasury companies in the U.S. today?

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We are an operating company with a treasury, so I think we're in a little bit of a different bucket than just a treasury. We obviously want to grow our Bitcoin stack because we believe in Bitcoin, but we also have these operating businesses. The questions we ask ourselves are, do we think our investment in the operating businesses is going to outperform Bitcoin? You have to think about that across different time horizons.

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If you're doing M&A, for example, your time horizon is going to be much longer. You have to integrate the business, make it work, and grow it. Whereas you can just buy Bitcoin and hold it, and you have your idea of where you think Bitcoin is going to go. From the beginning, we took the approach that we were going to have operating businesses. From our perspective, things like Bitcoin per share may not be the perfect metric for us.

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Not to tie it back to mining, but when miners first came out, there were 35 different metrics, like cost to mine a Bitcoin. If you look back, they all did it differently. Sometimes it was electricity costs, sometimes it was all-in cost, sometimes they were removing certain costs. I think we're in that same phase right now, where it's like, how do you figure out which one of these companies is good? Everyone kind of defaulted to NAV and Bitcoin per share, but that doesn't really work across the board as these companies grow into different things.

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If you have operating companies within a Bitcoin company, you should judge them as operating businesses, using very traditional metrics. When we think about institutional growth, institutional adoption, banks, and investment banks, they are going to look at you through the lens they use for every other business. Sometimes in Bitcoin, we try to get cute with metrics. If it is an operating business and it has a treasury, let's use metrics that everyone else knows, especially as we're trying to gain more institutional adoption.

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That makes a lot of sense, and I actually prefer that as well.

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I just want to add that I 100% agree with Amanda on the metrics. If you are considering investing in Bitcoin treasury companies, especially outside of the U.S., you have to look at the management. I cannot stress that enough: management's reputation and management's track record. There are a lot of small-cap companies that are just trying to chase this hot thing. Whenever we have a bear market like this, they move on to the next thing, and they are not doing what they promised to do.

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When you want to invest in a Bitcoin treasury company, look at management. Don't look at how many followers they have on X. Don't look at whether they appeared on TV. You have to see if they have been consistent over the past many years in what they said about Bitcoin, and if they are willing to follow through on what they promised to do long term. Of course, you also have to look at the investors of the company and whether they are supportive of the long-term vision.

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We're out of time. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Amanda. Thanks for coming.