The Future of Crypto on Corporate Balance Sheets

Some believe the crypto Renaissance age is upon us.

We're seeing trapped by companies increasingly integrating with crypto.

One example, Coinbase is launching a credit card with Amex that offers Bitcoin rewards.

Meanwhile, companies are continuing to add crypto to their balance sheets, among them Meta Planet Strategy and Truth Social, just to name a few.

Well joining me this morning at the New York Stock Exchange is Tim Cheng, Global head of strategy at.

Well Tim, great to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Well, first and foremost, when it comes to the strategy of Coinbase launching a credit card offering and getting Bitcoin, what do you make of that?

Look, I think it's tremendous.

Everyone who loves credit in America, what they wish they could have on top of that is rewards back in crypto, right?

And I think taking a step back, this is definitively the Renaissance age for cryptoto under Trump's administration.

I believe that there are two metrics we're looking at.

The first is how does that enable the onboarding of the next billion users into crypto and the next $1 trillion of capital institutionally in a crypto as well, and mantle is building in both regards.

And you mentioned Trump.

All eyes are in Washington DC, especially amid regulatory expectations for clarity here.

So what do you have your eyes on right now when it comes to the regulatory process?

Yeah, in that regard, we focus more on how this institutional capital get additional crypto beyond ETFs.

All eyes are on the Solana ETF, whether they'll approve staking.

I think what's interesting is for folks to go around and circumvent it the next hottest kid on the block are digital asset treasuries, and we're looking at ways to how do you take the digital assets that exist on chain, package them in a compliant way, and allow Main Street and Wall Street to buy them today.

And at that intersection we continue to eye IPOs as we head into the second half of 2025 and very recently Circle listed here at the New York Stock Exchange and so far we're seeing exponential gains for the shares of that company.

But when it comes to IPOs for the crypto landscape, what are your expectations then?

What do you make of what happened with Circle?

Yeah, tremendous and outstanding.

I mean, you see the stock.

Price rise 4 to 5x after listing, but more importantly, this shows us there's intense demand from Wall Street and Main Street today into crypto products that they cannot access otherwise because of regulatory means, right?

And so you know we've seen projects built on Mantle to choose the hundreds of millions of dollars in packaging these digital assets into ways in compliant wrappers.

So you know once that like to uses, there's $100 billion locked in decentralized finance on chain, which is a large proportion of capital on chain.

There's also $100 billion locked in just the Bitcoin ETFs to date, which is the tip of the spear of capital waiting on the sidelines of Tradfy waiting to come in.

And you've also been at a global investment fund and invested early in late stage tech companies worldwide.

So for viewers out there, they include high profile names such as Uber, Airbnb, and Palantir.

And when we think about the early days of those companies and how challenging it was in terms of the regulatory landscape, do you also compare?

What's happening in crypto to what you experienced back then.

Yeah, I think it's really two things.

One, the founders have to be bold in the right place, right time, right?

Most of those companies came out in the early 2010s, and we're seeing that magic happen again now.

The second is like 0% interest rates that really juiced the growth of those kinds of companies.

For crypto, we're now in a higher interest rate environment, but you know, once those interest rates come down, it's crypto renaissance here.

And finally, I do want to ask you about crypto on balance sheets.

So it's not just Bitcoin anymore, is it?

No, it's not.

We're seeing the other majors, Ethereum and Solana come to market with the likes of DFTV, UEy, Joe Lun's SE, and what we're excited for, what we're going to see is probably the top 20 coins take a similar approach.

I do think only some of these make sense, right?

You have to have a yield bearing component to it, so your cash flows pay for your OE, but I think in general what's more interesting is the next iteration will not just Single assets, but multiples like what if you took a diversified treasury of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Salon, right?

Instead of offering single assets, take the diversified approach to give traders retail, you know, something that hedges, fixed income traders, also traders all want to take a bite of because there are dislocations in the market.

So that's what we're really excited about.

And finally, before I let you go, since you mentioned that, do you expect more of that with public companies and what do you think of?

These companies that have Bitcoin on their balance sheets, do you expect that to continue?

Yes, there will be more, but there will be hot and cold funding cycles.

We'll probably see a big drop off going into the summer and then pick back up in Q4.

In terms of Bitcoin companies, the non-micro strategy of the world, I think the best expression is if you are a pure play Treasury allocator aggregator, meaning all you do is accumulate Bitcoin, right?

Micro strategy is one predominantly in the West, Metaplat in Japan.

There are some smaller names of, you know.

5 to $10 million listed Nasdaq companies who are accumulating Bitcoin, I think just for short term they might get a bump in their stock price, but long term if they don't have the right strategy in place, they will go by the wayside and maybe just get acquired at a discount by microstrategy.

OK, Tim, we will have to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining me and thank you for sharing your insight.

Thank you.