From Anchorage Digital to BitGo and Morgan Stanley, a growing cast of financial firms are reaping big fees riding the tidal wave of corporate bitcoin buying.
A record number of public companies are shoveling crypto onto their balance sheets—ostensibly to diversify their holdings, hedge against inflation and attract new investors. The unstated reason, of course, is management’s desire to boost their stock price. In recent months, just announcing a so-called “crypto treasury” strategy has been enough to add premiums to trading prices.
The real bonanza however, is flowing to the picks-and-shovels merchants of this latest gold rush: custodians, brokers, asset managers and investment banks collecting fees on every trade, transfer and storage deal.
Over the past six months, the trend has reached “fever pitch” and “has gone fully contagious,” says Nathan McCauley, cofounder and CEO of San Francisco-based Anchorage Digital. His crypto bank has already struck deals to oversee Trump Media’s $2 billion bitcoin treasury and a $760 million trove from Nakamoto Holdings, a bitcoin-focused company that recently announced a SPAC merger with KindlyMD, a tiny money losing Salt Lake City-based healthcare operation whose stock languished at under $2 per share before the May press release. Today, KindlyMD’s Nakamoto, whose name pays homage to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, is listed as NAKA on the NASDAQ. Its shares sell for $15, giving it a market cap of $114 million.
A year ago, a small group of corporate buyers collectively held just over 416,000 bitcoin. Today, no less than 152 publicly traded companies control over 950,000 coins worth over $110 billion, according to Bitcoin Treasuries.net. The undisputed whale in the group is still billionaire Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the company that pioneered the corporate crypto playbook, leaning heavily on creative financing from convertible notes to variable-rate perpetual preferred stock. Strategy Inc., which started life as a small Tysons Corner, VA-based software company known as MicroStrategy, now owns of $73 billion worth of bitcoin, yet has a market cap of $95 billion, a 25% premium to its crypto asset holdings.
And Strategy’s copycats aren’t stopping at bitcoin–they’re buying ether, solana and a whole roster of other digital assets. This year alone, corporations have raised more than $98 billion to do exactly that, according to Palo Alto-based crypto advisory firm Architect Partners, with another $59 billion pledged by 139 companies since June. Latest case in point: World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm majority-owned by the Trump family, recently announced a $1.5 billion treasury anchored by its own token, WLFI. That’s in addition to Trump Media’s $2 billion bitcoin treasury.
For now, the broader impact of the trend is hard to quantify since it is still in its early stages, says Architect Partners’ Elliot Chun, but the frenzy has already “generated a lot of fees across the board.”
Underwriting commissions and other fees from offerings of preferred stock and convertibles are already proving to be a lucrative business for numerous traditional investment banks and broker-dealers, including Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital, Moelis & Company, and TD Securities.
Take for example Strategy’s recent $722 million offering of 8.5 million shares of preferred stock in March. Morgan Stanley served as an underwriter, along with about a dozen other firms making an estimated $10 million in fees. MARA Holdings, a Fort-Lauderdale firm dedicated to mining cryptocurrencies and now buying and hoarding bitcoin, issued $950 million of convertible notes in July. Morgan Stanley and others are likely to reap $10 million on that deal.
Another beneficiary of the crypto treasury boom are qualified custodians, who safeguard digital assets on behalf of clients. Take veteran BitGo, headquartered in Palo Alto, which crossed $100 billion in assets under custody in the first half of 2025, thanks both to a booming crypto market and the growth of corporate treasuries.
“[Corporate treasuries] are an increasing portion of our business. We didn’t see much dedicated to this over six months ago, but it’s a good portion of new clients,” says Adam Sporn, head of prime brokerage and U.S. institutional sales at BitGo. He estimates that about two dozen crypto treasury companies have announced custody deals with BitGo in just the past couple of months. The surge in business helped pave the way for the company to confidentially file for an IPO in July.
Major custodians such as BitGo and Coinbase charge institutional clients a mix of upfront, annual and add-on fees for holding their crypto and helping them earn income on it. The most common structure is an annual cut of assets under custody, typically ranging from 0.15% to 0.30% though big clients can negotiate rates down to 10 basis points, or 0.10%, says Ravi Doshi, FalconX’s global co-head of markets.
Though these fees translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the custodians acting as stewards to tens of billions in bitcoin, the margins on custody deals are typically razor thin. The demand for cryptocurrencies created by these proxies is also creating additional revenue for exchanges and prime brokers like Coinbase, FalconX and Cumberland. Each purchase feeds a cycle: more buying pushes up prices, draws in new investors and gets more tokens to trade, notes Dan Dolev, senior fintech analyst at Mizuho.
Beyond trading and custody, yield services like staking, lending and options overlays are another lucrative lane. Staking rewards users who lock their tokens to help validate blockchain transactions, while options strategies involve using financial derivatives to adjust a portfolio’s risk-reward profile without altering its underlying asset allocation.
“As these companies raise capital with the intention of putting it on their balance sheet, they quickly come to the question of ‘what now?’” says Architect Partners’ Chun. “There’s more than $60 billion in crypto assets that need to generate a return, and these publicly traded companies can’t do it themselves.” So far, companies have been relying on the appreciation of the underlying asset to drive returns, but the rapid proliferation of the crypto treasury trend will put pressure on firms to differentiate themselves, by seeking yield-generating strategies or low cost capital to buy bitcoin, says Sidney Powell, CEO of Melbourne-based crypto lending firm Maple Finance.
To build their competitive advantage, these companies may increasingly turn to institutional lenders like Two Prime and Maple Finance, and asset managers like Wave Digital Assets, Arca and Galaxy, who charge between 25 to 50 basis points for treasury management services, according to Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at crypto asset manager and advisory firm Bitwise. Earlier this month, Galaxy reported $175 million in inflows for its treasury asset management business, in part for providing treasury asset solutions for their 20 or so customers that hold cryptocurrencies in their treasuries.
Meanwhile, Wall Street is already bankrolling the spree. Encouraged by a friendlier policy climate under President Trump and clearer regulations, mutual fund giant Capital Group, hedge fund D1 Capital Partners and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald are among those financing the corporate crypto hoarding.
Despite crypto’s naysayers, the digital asset treasury boom is in early innings. “We think, eventually, all companies will be crypto treasury companies in one way, shape or form,” says Leon, noting that some $31 trillion is now held in corporate cash reserves worldwide. “Whether they hold 1%, 10% or 100% of their balance sheet assets in crypto, they’re going to hold something. So we have a lot of room to run.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliegoldenberg/2025/08/19/whos-getting-rich-off-the-100-billion-crypto-treasury-boom/
