More than 190 public companies now hold Bitcoin. For almost all of them, those holdings earn nothing.

That surprises people, because the headline playbook looks like it works for everyone. It doesn’t. The model Strategy built between 2020 and 2024, issuing equity, convertible debt, and preferred instruments against its Bitcoin to buy more, is genuinely impressive. But it runs on conditions most companies can’t meet: an mNAV above 1, capital markets access, investor appetite for preferred equity, and the ability to issue continuously. Strive’s CEO put real numbers on the gate. Institutional buyers wanted a minimum of $200 million in issuance, with meaningful appetite starting above $500 million. At around $78,000 a coin, that is about 2,600 bitcoin just to enter, and about 6,400 to be taken seriously. Most treasuries are not close. At least 37 of the top 100 already trade below their net asset value. For them, the dominant playbook is something to watch, not something to run.

So it helps to name what is actually on the menu. A Bitcoin treasury has three ways to generate a return. Digital credit issues instruments against the holdings to fund more accumulation, the Strategy model. Derivative yield uses financial overlays, covered calls and basis trades, to pull income out of price volatility, where the early miners landed by default. And Native Yield deploys the Bitcoin to the network’s own infrastructure, routing payments on Lightning, and earns operational income for doing it.

The first two have been documented for years. The third had not been, until recently. It only became viable in 2025, once the first companies showed that recurring operational income could be earned directly from Bitcoin’s own rails. I wrote Lightning Economics to give that third category a formal framework, the way digital credit already had one.

The point is not that one wins. These categories are additive, not competing. The point is that if your treasury cannot run the credit playbook, you are not out of options. You have been reading a menu with one item crossed off and the third left blank. I filled in the third.